Welcome to the Clemson Engineering Design Applications and Research (CEDAR) Group at Clemson University. Our research group is dedicated to exploring issues related to functional, usable and environmental design, with secondary emphasis on artistic design. We explore topics ranging from theories to tools, informatics to design education, creativity to decision making, function-based to affordance-based, collaboration to representation, optimization to manufacturing, and packaging to complexity. As a research group we are dedicated to excellence, rigor, and integrity. We actively publish the results of our work in internationally recognized journals and conferences to share our findings - we feel that it is our ethical duty and responsibility to contribute to the discipline. We work with industry to help them innovate, improve their designs, and learn relevant approaches. Our group's philosophy is to push the state of the art in design while graduating design practitioners, design researchers, and design tool developers. We realize that our main contribution in moving the field of design forward does not come from commercialization of our published research. Rather, our most important impact, our most valuable product, is our students. We strive to train our students to contribute significantly once they enter industry or academia. This training includes academic, research, and social training. We seek to create true Engineers that are capable of looking at a variety of (seemingly unsolvable) problems, extracting their core essence, devising an approach to address them, solving them, and finally, intelligibly communicating the solutions to the customers.
We welcome all opportunities for collaboration, be that with companies through sponsored project development, with federal agencies through sponsored research, with industry through internships, or with individuals through consulting. If you are interested in any of these opportunities, please contact the lab directors: