New technological developments are changing how the product design community communicates in the workplace and in the classroom. Slack, an online communication application with some project management features, has become a popular communication tool among many workers and students. This paper examines the Slack conversation conducted by 16 student product development teams in a course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 2.009: Product Engineering Processes. Following a typical product development process, co-located teams of 17–20 students each used the online communication tool in addition to face-to-face meetings to design new products in one semester. The resulting conversations were analyzed for message count over the course of the semester, message count by day of the week and hour of the day, message count by user, and communication organization. It was observed that teams tended to increase their communication right before deadlines and decrease it right after. When viewing teams’ communication patterns by day of the week and the hour of the day, it was seen that many teams increased their communication in a short period after team meetings. In both of these cases, successful teams tended to have more consistent communication. There was little correlation (R2 = 2186) between the number of hours teams reported working on the class and their Slack activity by day. When looking at a team’s total volume of communication, high volumes may indicate team members are working well, but it may also indicate they are struggling. Teams with higher levels of success tended to have more organized communication structures than teams with lower levels of success, as assessed by instructors. In addition to the data collected in this work, further research is still needed to understand with more certainty how online communication patterns correlate to teams’ levels of success or team behaviors.

This paper presents the merits of village-scale photovoltaic (PV) powered electrodialysis reversal (EDR) systems for rural India and the design and analysis of such a system built by the authors with planned testing to be completed in March 2015 in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The requirements for the system include daily water output of 6–15 m3/day (enough potable water for the average village size of 2,000–5,000 people), removal of dissolved salts in addition to biological contaminants, photovoltaic power source, recovery ratio of greater than 85% and appropriate maintenance and service scheme. At present, most village-scale desalination systems use reverse osmosis (RO), however the managing NGOs have found the systems to be cost prohibitive in off-grid locations. EDR has the potential to be more cost effective than currently installed village-scale RO systems in off-grid locations due to the lower specific energy consumption of EDR versus RO at high recovery ratios. This leads to lower power system cost and overall capital expense. The system developed in this study is designed to validate whether the system requirements can be met in terms of recovery ratio, product water quality, specific energy consumption, and expected capital cost. The system is designed to desalinate 3600 ppm brackish groundwater to 350 ppm at a rate of 1.6 m3/hour and a recovery of 92%. This paper reviews the scope of the market for village scale desalination, existing groundwater salinity levels, and presents the design methodology and resulting system parameters for a village-scale PV-EDR field trial.

Online communication and collaboration tools are changing the way teams design products. The tools also generate a rich data source from which to study trends in communication. This paper focuses on how engineering teams utilize Slack, a popular team messaging software platform. We aim to better understand communication and coordination in product design teams via analysis of team social network dynamics, unique patterns of chat-like messaging (emoji usage), and the evolution of communication topics over time. Our study analyzes the online interactions of 32 teams, sent during a 3-month senior undergraduate product design course. These 400,000+ messages represent the team communications from 4 years of teams, with 17–20 students per team. We find that 1) Slack communications resulted in high density network maps, 2) network analysis of teams reveals that leaders have more central positions in the network, 3) strong teams have lower average centrality among members, equivalent to less public channel membership per person, 4) stronger teams use emojis at a higher rate, and 5) emojis are used most by leaders and highly connected members. These findings represent preliminary foundations for best practices in online messaging, which may lead to more effective collaboration in product design.

East Africa (EA), a region facing food shortages, has very little irrigation adoption compared to the rest of the world. Increasing irrigation has been shown to increase food cultivation, so governments and private organizations have been attempting to introduce irrigation products into the EA market. Despite this support, irrigation adoption rates remain low, meaning existing solutions do not meet the needs of medium-to-small scale farmers. Meeting these needs is challenging because the types of farmers in EA are diverse, and these differences have not yet been elucidated. This study sought to do so and to understand if new opportunities exist for irrigation products targeted at this range of farmers. We first conducted an interview-based market assessment to reveal which market segments exist and what each values in an irrigation system. Then, we conducted a technical and economic feasibility analysis to reveal which irrigation methods and energy sources are most promising for each segment. Four distinct market segments were found. The traditional smallholder would most value a system that uses photovoltaic (PV) and manual irrigation. The semi-commercial smallholder’s most promising system uses PV panels and butterfly sprinklers. Both the medium-scale contract farmer and the remote farm owner would value PV panel- and drip irrigation-based systems. These identified opportunities for innovation can guide irrigation designers as they develop new systems that directly serve farmers’ needs, with the aim to increase irrigation and food security in EA.

Food insecurity in East Africa (EA) is exacerbated by the effects of climate change. Water scarcity and high energy costs make it difficult for farmers to increase their yields to levels needed to feed growing populations. One way for countries to sustainably increase food production is to increase the adoption of water- and energy-efficient irrigation technology. Solar-powered drip irrigation systems are such a technology. These systems provide many benefits to farmers who have been able to install them on their fields, but their high costs is one barrier that currently limits its adoption among the majority of EA farmers. In this work, a concept for a novel irrigation controller is introduced and assessed for its viability in the EA market. The proposed controller determines complex irrigation schedules based on local weather predictions and specifics of a given farm. It does this while optimizing for the lifetime performance of the irrigation system, something that existing controllers do not do and something that could lower the lifetime costs of solar-powered drip irrigation systems. The proposed controller communicates this complex schedule to farmers in a way that allows them to continue to use low-cost, manually-operated valves on their fields. This concept is evaluated through storyboard-based interviews with EA farmers and key market stakeholders. The results provide initial positive feedback from these lead users, suggesting that this controller could be a viable product in EA. If adopted at scale, this technology could help lower the barrier to adopting water- and energy-efficient irrigation, ultimately having a positive, sustainable impact on food security in EA.