Abstract
Human Factors professionals rarely work in isolation. The success of any product is contingent upon many other groups, including engineers, industrial designers, marketers and salespeople. Formal human factors education rarely includes interaction with members of these groups, and only considers their concerns in passing. Florida International University, as a member of the National Science Foundation Gateway Coalition, has recently created the Multi-Year, Multi-University Projects (MYMUP) group as an experimental program to investigate interdisciplinary training at the undergraduate level. Student project teams from human factors, civil and environmental engineering, and architecture and design collaborated on a project entitled “Smart Streets.” The project involved the creation of kiosks in heavily trafficked urban areas to support tourism and way-finding through interactive computer systems and vending. Each student team communicated with teams in other departments and at other universities through telephone, electronic mail, desktop videoconferencing and the internet. The final design incorporated the constraints and ideas of each discipline, simulating the corporate design process. Team interaction followed the model seen in today's virtual corporation.
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