Facilities

The Design Group offers a rich and diverse set of facilities in support of its academic and research efforts. Among them:

Faculty and administrative offices are located in Building 550 also known as the Peterson Laboratory Building, which concluded an extensive renovation in March 2010.  Bldg 550 also houses the d.school.  The exterior doors on the Design side are open 8 AM to 8 PM, with extended hours in the summer.  Bldg 550 is closed to non-residents on weekends, however reservations can be made in advance for hosted activities on weekends.


Information about reserving space and posting fliers in Building 550 is here.

Terman Engineering Center, the Design Group's home for many years, was demolished in December 2011 and replaced by Terman Park. 

Excavator tears down walls, ceilings and floors of Terman Engineering Center (10/18/11)  

Frederick E. Terman Engineering Center, is gone, but not lost (3/14/12)

The Alex Tung Memorial Assistive Technology Laboratory at Stanford (ATLAS) (Prof. Drew Nelson, Director; David L. Jaffe, MS, Associate Director) provides space and prototyping resources for ENGR110/210 student teams engaged in designing and fabricating devices to benefit individuals with disabilities and older adults. It is located in Bldg 550, Rm 134

The Automotive Innovation Facility houses the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab (VAIL) which offers a state-of-the-art vehicle research facility where interdisciplinary teams can work on projects that move vehicle technology forward.  High-profile Stanford projects accommodated in the building comprise research on drive-by-wire and driver assistance systems research by the Dynamic Design Lab of Chris Gerdes, including Shelley, the vehicle that raced up Pikes Peak without a drive in 2010; artificial intelligence controlled vehicles like Junior, Stanford's entry in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge; research on the interaction of drivers with vehicles in a driving simulator operated by the Communication between Humans and Interactive Media Lab of Cliff Nass; and the Stanford Solar Car Project that designs, builds and operates the vehicles competing in the World Wolar Challenge in Australia.  In order to improve safety, sustainability, performance, and enjoyment of automobiles, the Automotive Innovation Facility provides a place for researchers to test new ideas in real vehicles.  AIL is located toward the western end of Stanford Campus, at the corner of Stock Farm and Oak Road. 

The Bio-inspired Flight Lab (Prof. David Lentink, Director) studies the mechanics of flying organisms, especially birds, insects and autorotating seeds.

The Biorobotics and Dextrous Manipulation Laboratory (Prof. Mark Cutkosky, PI) is affiliated with the Center for Design Research. BDML research activities include: modeling and control of dextrous manipulation with robotic and teleoperated hands; force and tactile feedback in telemanipulation and virtual environments; design and control of compliant "biomimetic" robots with embedded sensors and actuators.

The Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) (Prof. Chris Gerdes, Director; Sven Beiker, PhD, Executive Director) operates an interdisciplinary automotive research lab, the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab (VAIL). By creating a community of faculty and students from a range of disciplines at Stanford with leading industry researchers, CARS strives to radically re-envision the automobile for unprecedented levels of safety, performance and enjoyment.  CARS' mission is to discover, build, and deploy the critical ideas and innovations for the next generation of cars and drivers. 

The Center for Design Research (Prof. Larry Leifer, Director) is a community of scholars focused on understanding and augmenting engineering design innovation and design education. We are dedicated to facilitating individual creativity, understanding the team design process, and developing advanced tools and methods that promote superior design and manufacturing of products. We develop concepts and technical solutions for design thinking, concurrent engineering, distributed collaborative design, and design knowledge capture, indexing and re-use. We focus on methods and tools for improving the design of specific engineering systems, with research in structural integrity evaluation and system modeling, virtual design environments, biomimetic robots, haptic controls and telemanipulation, vehicle dynamics and driver assistance systems.  CDR is located in Building 560.

Stanford ChangeLabs (Prof. Banny Banerjee, Director) is a trans-disciplinary community creating new approaches for achieving rapid, large-scale impact in our most pressing global challenges -- rapid climate change, the global water shortage, economic inequity, the energy crisis, and environmental devastation.  Through research into the dynamics of transformation and co-creation of real-world interventions that pilot theories and frameworks, ChangeLabs aims to equip leaders and institutions globally with the tools to more effectively approach complex issues where speed, scale, and sustainability are of particular importance. Current projects include:  the 100-Liter Water Project, ARPE-E Behavior Change in Energy, "D-Delta-B" Design for Change in Behavior, and Public Sector Innovation.  ChangeLabs is located in Building 550. 

The Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine Lab (CHARM Lab) (Prof. Allison Okamura, PI) develops principles and tools needed to realize advanced robotic and human-machine systems capable of haptic (touch) interaction.  Systems for teleoperation, virtual environments, and robotic manipulation are designed and studied using both analytical and experimental approaches.  Application areas include surgery, simulation and training, rehabilitation, prosthetics, neuromechanics, exploration of hazardous and remote environments, design, and education. The lab is located in the Mechanical Engineering Research Laboratory (MERL, Building 660), Room 126.

The Design Observatory (DO) (Prof. Larry Leifer, PI) is a research environment for studying engineering design activity by observing it, analyzing it and intervening into it. Engineering designers either individually or in teams can perform a variety of design activities like idea generation, prototyping, and design meetings in the DO. Through observation, videotape and analysis, the researchers discover patterns of behavior that are correlated to effective design performance. The DO environment is flexible enough to allow researchers to set up different design experiments quickly and easily. It also allows researchers to investigate various aspects of design behavior in a detailed manner. The end results of the research carried out in the DO are new metrics of effective design behaviors, new research methods and new design behaviors or practices. The DO is located in the Center for Design Research, Building 560.

The Designing Education Lab (DEL) (Prof. Sheri Sheppard, PD) investigates a broad range of engineering education topics, from the persistence of students and alumni in engineering fields to the impact of exposure to entrepreneurship on engineering students' career interests.  DEL researchers are engaged in national and international collaborations with colleagues within and outside of engineering.  Our activities and projects emphasize the relationship of research to academic and professional practice by informing the redesign of engineering course pedagogy and curriculum and the dissemination of findings in conference papers, workshops, webinars, online resources, and publications.  The DEL is located in the Center for Design Research, Building 560.

Chris Gerdes is Director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) and directs his own laboratory, the Dynamic Design Lab (DDL). Research interests in the DDL include vehicle dynamics, design of x-by-wire systems, driver assistance systems and control of homogeneous charge compression ignition engines.  A good example is the current development of autonomous racing and drifting algorithms to enable Shelley, an Audi TT-S, to race up Pikes Peak without a driver.

The Experimental Mechanics Lab (Prof. Drew Nelson, PI), located in MERL (Building 660), provides rotating bending and combined torsion-bending fatigue testing machines, a digital speckle pattern interferometry set-up, and a system for high strain rate tensile and shear testing of miniature specimens.

The Loft (located in Building 610) is a unique facility that represents the culture of innovation at Stanford.  It is a space in which students of the Stanford Design Program (Prof. David Kelley, Program Director) carry out graduate level design work

The ME310 Design Team Development Loft (Prof. Larry Leifer, PI) provides space and technical support for globally distributed product development teams working on corporate partner projects. Teams are assigned a desktop design station with internet video studio support. The facility is located in Building 550.

The Microscale Engineering Laboratory is located in the Mechanical Engineering Research Laboratory (MERL, Building 660), and is shared by Professors Goodson, Kenny and Santiago, of the Thermosciences and Design Groups.  This lab features facilities for thermal, mechanical, and fluid measurements with a unifying emphasis on microscale aspects.  In addition to the individual research activities of these faculty members, there are also several shared PhD projects, involving a mixture of thermal, mechanical and fluids issues in single projects.

The focus of the Nanoscale Prototyping Laboratory (Prof. Fritz Prinz, PI) is on the design and fabrication of micro and nanoscale devices for energy and biology. Examples include fuel cells and bioreactors. Interest is in mass transport phenomena across thin membranes such as oxide films and lipid bi-layers. This research group studies electro-chemical phenomena with the help of Atomic Force Microscopy, Impedance Spectroscopy and Quantum Modeling. The facility is located in Building 530.

Stanford's Product Realization Laboratory (Prof. David Beach & Craig Milroy, Directors; Marlo Kohn, Associate Director) is a multi-site teaching facility with roots in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and deep synergies with the Stanford Design Program, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school), and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.  The Product Realizabion Lab is open to Stanford undergraduate, graduate, and professional school students who aspire to design and create objects of lasting value.  For a list of courses and to learn more, please visit the Product Realization Lab website.

The Smart Product Design Laboratory (Prof. Ed Carryer, Director) supports microprocessor application projects related to ME218abcd and is located in the Thornton Center.

The Stanford Micro-Structures and Sensors Laboratory (Prof. Tom Kenny, PI) is the setting for efforts to develop and fabricate novel mechanical structures. Basic research on the non-classical phenomena exhibited by micro structures is emphasized as well.