The direction of the development of the industrial design gradually approaches mechanical-electrical integration and informational and electronic products. With an increasing improvement of its technical content, and better social economic conditions, people’s consumption concept are getting more and more different. Consumer concerns not just the functionality and quality of the product, more a...

The use of tangible objects is paramount in industrial design. Throughout the design process physical prototypes are used to enable exploration, simulation, communication, and specification of designs. Although much is known about prototyping skills and technologies, the reasons why and how such models are employed in design practice are poorly understood. Advanced techniques and design media s...

Computer graphics research is increasingly interested in the high-level analysis and processing of geometric objects. The focus is more on the objects’ structure, semantics, and even functionalities than their geometric details. By acquiring a structural or functional understanding of 3D shapes, researchers are able to tackle midto high-level design problems for which machine computations can r...

Industrial design and interaction design meet in the development of ubiquitous computing or Ubicomp, i.e., the currently emerging situation where information and communication technology move from the desktop to pervade most aspects of our everyday world. We show that the material qualities of Ubicomp coincide with the areas where contemporary industrial design and interaction design overlap th...

Increasingly, the design of successful new industrial products is related to careful market assessment. Traditionally, managers and researchers have studied their markets by examining a small number of product attributes that are common across a range of informed respondents. In many ways, these techniques fail to meet the challenges posed by today's often heterogeneous, highly competitive, fas...

Ion conducting membranes/electrolytes have been employed extensively in some important industrial and biological systems, especially in fuel cells, water electrolyzers, gas separation, sensors and biological selective ion transport, acting as one of the core components and sometimes directly determining the device performance. However, the traditional polymeric proton exchange membranes (PEMs)/...

QUADRATIC INVERSE EIGENVALUE PROBLEMS: THEORY, METHODS, AND APPLICATIONS Vadim Olegovich Sokolov, Ph.D. Department of Mathematical Sciences Northern Illinois University, 2008 Biswa Nath Datta, Director This dissertation is devoted to the study of quadratic inverse eigenvalue problems from theoretical, computational and applications points of view. Special attention is given to two important pra...