The night panorama below shows Los Angeles, the Central Valley, and the Sierra Nevada in the foreground, with Salt Lake City and a display of green aurora (left) on the horizon.

What We Do

The Collective Design (CoDe) Lab at Arizona State University studies strategic engineering design with distributed authority, leading to collective decision-making problems. Positioned within the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence within the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, we build on theory and tools in design science, information systems, and applied economics to understand and improve the process of design.

Collective Problems

We study strategic engineering design problems across multiple application domains:

  • Earth Science Space Missions
  • Human Space Exploration Campaigns
  • Resource-intensive Infrastructure Systems

Collective Dynamics

We consider a range of collective dynamics that emerge from distributed design authority, including:

  • Adversarial: advance individual outcomes by hindering another’s.
  • Competitive: advance individual outcomes.
  • Coordinative: share resources to advance individual outcomes.
  • Cooperative: share resources to advance mutual outcomes.
  • Collaborative: share resources to advance a common goal.

Collective Methods

We employ numerous research approaches to understand underlying dynamics and facilitate collective design:

  • Mission and Systems Engineering
  • Interactive Simulation and Gaming
  • Parallel and Distributed Simulation
  • Game Theory
  • Human Behavioral Experiments

Background image: Public Domain NASA.