A multidisciplinary course in rapid prototyping of wearable computers

The paper describes a multidisciplinary, systems building course at Carnegie Mellon University. Over the last eight semesters that the course has been taught, teams of undergraduate and graduate students have designed and fabricated seven new generations of wearable computers, using an evolving artifact- specific, multidisciplinary design methodology. Between the first and last generation, the electronic functionality has increased by a factor of three, the number of mechanical features has increased by a factor of 10, and the software complexity has increased by a factor of 25 while the total design effort measured in hours has increased by less than a factor of two.