the design research unit

Design Research Unit

Building from the original ethos of the DRU. Today “Research – discovery – intelligence – knowledge – disseminate,” has become ‘Imagination – shifting boundaries – recognition – appropriateness – conversation/communication – return on investment.’”

Building on this extraordinary legacy, the DRU is our knowledge base. A think tank, a place to break rules and drive change across the industry – the Design Research Unit informs all levels of our process. From research into innovative materials and construction through to design output, industry collaborations and standards. 

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In this work.

• Read, Herbert (1895–1968)
• Black, Misha (1910–77)
• Gray, Milner (1899–1997)
• Britain Can Make It Exhibition (1946)
• Festival of Britain (1951)
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• Bibliography
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Design Research Unit ( DRU ) (established 1943)  

The Design Research Unit (DRU) was one of the first generation of British design consultancies that sought to offer a wide range of specialist services covering the design spectrum. In the wake of discussions with ... ...

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Book: Design Research Unit 1942­-72

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The years immediately following World War II were anything but fallow. While the country struggled with rationing and rebuilding, the creative classes were gearing up to set the visual tone for the era - and the decades that followed. Spearheading the era's new aesthetic was the Design Research Unit , an austerely monickered but eccentrically staffed graphic design studio that went on to be the model of the modern design agency. Michelle Cotton's new monograph on the work of the Unit covers the three fertile decades from 1942, embracing great swathes of British visual culture.

The DRU was born out of the ashes of the Bassett Gray group, an esoteric collection of artists and writers who thrived on ceremony, fraternity and having a jolly good time. Well known for their 'bibbing ceremonies' - grand dinners with lavishly designed menus, place settings and costumes - the Bassett Grays were joined by the young Misha Black in 1932 (a few years after the convivial bibbing tradition had ceased).

Black was a stranger to English quirks, having been born Moisei Tcherny in Baku, Azerbaijan, 22 years earlier, but he quickly adapted. A self-described commercial artist, he began working on posters and trade shows in the early 1930s, trading as Studio Z from dingy digs in Covent Garden.

The artist was nothing if not well-connected, and his membership of Artists International Association saw a number of contemporary luminaries beat a path to his door for left-leaning meetings about art, unity and society. Black also founded the Society of Industrial Artists and was a member of the Modern Architecture Research Society (MARS), placing him firmly at the heart of Britain's burgeoning modernist class.

By the outbreak of war, Black was associated with, amongst others, Henry Moore, Vanessa Bell, Edward Wadsworth, Herbert Read, Wells Coates, Berthold Lubetkin, László Moholy-Nagy, Maxwell Fry, John Betjeman, Morton Shand, Eric Ravilious, Paul Nash and Eric Gill. The list goes on.

DRU itself was borne out Black's wartime secondment to the Ministry of Information, the government department that generated enormous volumes of inspirational and educational print, poster and exhibition design in order to steer the British people towards victory. It was a time of massive responsibility and opportunity. As Cotton notes, 'in 1943 [the MoI] mounted an exhibition of 150,000 items of army equipment in the ruins of the bombed John Lewis department store on Oxford Street. The exhibition received 1,300,000 visitors in three months.'

All this stood Black in good stead, and by the early 1940s the seeds of the DRU were germinating. Officially founded on 1 January 1943 by Black, Herbert Read, Marcus Brumwell and Milner Gray, its manifesto said it all: ' The machine is accepted as the essentially modern vehicle of form. Our designs will therefore be essentially designs for mass production, but at the same time we hope to rescue mass production from the ugliness and aesthetic emptiness which has so far characterised the greater part of its output ... it is necessary to reintegrate the worlds of art and industry, for only on that basis can we progress towards a new and vital civilisation.'

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The Herculean energy and efforts of the era make fascinating reading. It was a time of collaboration and experimentation; Naum Gabo's experimental car design for Jowett, for example, was worked up with clay models by Bernard Leach and perspectives by Ben Nicholson. How many contemporary car companies would kill for such immersion in the pioneering arts of the era?

Cotton traces the Unit's work from the end of the war, through to its involvement with the 'Britain Can Make It' exhibition of 1946 and on to the 1951 Festival, with which the DRU and its members were intimately involved. Indeed, it was Black himself who pushed for the South Bank site, drawing up a radical masterplan as early as 1946, with swooping glass and a spiky observation tower that wouldn't look out of place in any contemporary architect's portfolio.

Following the Festival, the DRU continued to play a major role in British design culture. Together with Watneys, the Unit shaped the modern pub, with signage and design that was grudgingly dubbed 'ghastly good taste' by the Architects Journal. Perhaps most significantly of all, the DRU gave the newly nationalised British Railways its classic identity, with typography by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert and the iconic two-way arrow designed by Gerald Barney. It was a colossal undertaking, from signage down to matchbooks. DRU continued to grow, with collaborators and associates including Richard and Su Rogers, who together with Renzo Piano and Jan Kaplicky, drew up an ambitious plan to extend the Unit's Marylebone offices.

The DRU still exists today as part of Scott Brownrigg Architects . Crisply designed by A Practice for Everyday Life , Design Research Unit 1942-72 deserves a place on every designer's bookshelf, not least for the immense sense of history and achievement contained within it. The 1942-72 era is also featured in a traveling exhibition of original archive material that ends its run at the Cooper Gallery in Dundee on 17 December 2011.

Published by Koenig Books, the book looks at three fertile decades of DRU's output from 1942, embracing great swathes of British visual culture

Left: an exhibition of army equipment mounted in the ruins of a bombed John Lewis by the likes of Misha Black, Kenneth Bayes, Frederick Gibberd and Bronek Katz in 1943 attracted over a million viewers Right: DRU in 1944

Design Research Unit leaflets, c.1943

Working with Watneys for over 15 years, the Unit helped shape the modern pub. Pictured is Watneys packaging and signage

Pages from the Watney House Identification Manual, 1966; Watneys typefaces

In the early 1960s, DRU gave the newly nationalised British Railways its classic identity, with typography by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert and the iconic two-way arrow designed by Gerald Barney

Corporate identity design for ICI, 1960s

Jonathan Bell has written for Wallpaper* magazine since 1999, covering everything from architecture and transport design to books, tech and graphic design. He is now the magazine’s Transport and Technology Editor. Jonathan has written and edited 15 books, including Concept Car Design, 21st Century House, and The New Modern House. He is also the host of Wallpaper’s first podcast.

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Design Research

What is design research.

Design research is the practice of gaining insights by observing users and understanding industry and market shifts. For example, in service design it involves designers’ using ethnography—an area of anthropology—to access study participants, to gain the best insights and so be able to start to design popular services.

“We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.” — Carl Rogers, Psychologist and founding father of the humanistic approach & psychotherapy research

Service design expert and Senior Director of User Research at Twitch Kendra Shimmell explains what goes into good design research in this video.

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Get Powerful Insights with Proper Design Research

When you do user research well, you can fuel your design process with rich insights into how your target users interact—or might interact—in contexts to do the things they must do to achieve their goals using whatever they need on the way. That’s why it’s essential to choose the right research methods and execute them properly. Then, you’ll be able to reach those participants who agree to be test users/customers, so they’ll be comfortable enough to give you accurate, truthful insights about their needs, desires, pain points and much more. As service design can involve highly intricate user journeys , things can be far more complex than in “regular” user experience (UX) design . That’s where design research comes in, with its two main ingredients:

Qualitative research – to understand core human behaviors, habits and tasks/goals

Industry and Market research – to understand shifts in technology and in business models and design-relevant signs

An ideal situation—where you have enough resources and input from experts—is to combine the above to obtain the clearest view of the target customers of your proposed—or improved—service and get the most accurate barometer reading of what your market wants and why. In any case, ethnography is essential. It’s your key to decoding this very human economy of habits, motivations, pain points, values and other hard-to-spot factors that influence what people think, feel, say and do on their user journeys. It’s your pathway to creating personas —fictitious distillations that prove you empathize with your target users as customers—and to gain the best insights means you carefully consider how to access these people on their level. When you do ethnographic field studies, you strive for accurate observations of your users/customers in the context of using a service .

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

How to Leverage Ethnography to Do Proper Design Research

Whatever your method or combination of methods (e.g., semi-structured interviews and video ethnography), the “golden rules” are:

Build rapport – Your “test users” will only open up in trusting, relaxed, informal, natural settings. Simple courtesies such as thanking them and not pressuring them to answer will go a long way. Remember, human users want a human touch, and as customers they will have the final say on a design’s success.

Hide/Forget your own bias – This is a skill that will show in how you ask questions, which can subtly tell users what you might want to hear. Instead of asking (e.g.) “The last time you used a pay app on your phone, what was your worst security concern?”, try “Can you tell me about the last time you used an app on your phone to pay for something?”. Questions that betray how you might view things can make people distort their answers.

Embrace the not-knowing mindset and a blank-slate approach – to help you find users’ deep motivations and why they’ve created workarounds. Trying to forget—temporarily—everything you’ve learned about one or more things can be challenging. However, it can pay big dividends if you can ignore the assumptions that naturally creep into our understanding of our world.

Accept ambiguity – Try to avoid imposing a rigid binary (black-and-white/“yes”-or-“no”) scientific framework over your users’ human world.

Don’t jump to conclusions – Try to stay objective. The patterns we tend to establish to help us make sense of our world more easily can work against you as an observer if you let them. It’s perfectly human to rely on these patterns so we can think on our feet. But your users/customers already will be doing this with what they encounter. If you add your own subjectivity, you’ll distort things.

Keep an open mind to absorb the users’ world as present it – hence why it’s vital to get some proper grounding in user research. It takes a skilled eye, ear and mouth to zero in on everything there is to observe, without losing sight of anything by catering to your own agendas, etc.

Gentle encouragement helps; Silence is golden – a big part of keeping a naturalistic setting means letting your users stay comfortable at their own pace (within reason). Your “Mm-mmhs” of encouragement and appropriate silent stretches can keep your research safe from users’ suddenly putting politeness ahead of honesty if they feel (or feel that you’re) uncomfortable.

Overall, remember that two people can see the same thing very differently, and it takes an open-minded, inquisitive, informal approach to find truly valuable insights to understand users’ real problems.

Learn More about Design Research

Take our Service Design course, featuring many helpful templates: Service Design: How to Design Integrated Service Experiences

This Smashing Magazine piece nicely explores the human dimensions of design research: How To Get To Know Your Users

Let Invision expand your understanding of design research’s value, here: 4 types of research methods all designers should know .

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What is the main goal of design research?

• To increase the speed of the design process
• To learn what informs design decisions
• To lower the cost of production

Why are ethnographic studies important in design research?

• They focus on quantitative data collection.
• They help understand user behavior in natural contexts.
• They prioritize technological advancements.

What are the two main types of research methods used in design research?

• Qualitative and market research
• Qualitative and quantitative research
• Quantitative and user experience design

What is a key aspect of empathy in design research?

• Focus on aesthetic design
• Prioritize designers' ideas and needs
• Understand users' perspectives and needs

Why is it important to avoid bias in design research?

• To decrease the overall research costs
• To make sure insights are objective and accurate
• To speed up the research process

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Literature on Design Research

Here’s the entire UX literature on Design Research by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Design Research

Take a deep dive into Design Research with our course Service Design: How to Design Integrated Service Experiences .

Services are everywhere! When you get a new passport, order a pizza or make a reservation on AirBnB, you're engaging with services. How those services are designed is crucial to whether they provide a pleasant experience or an exasperating one. The experience of a service is essential to its success or failure no matter if your goal is to gain and retain customers for your app or to design an efficient waiting system for a doctor’s office.

In a service design process, you use an in-depth understanding of the business and its customers to ensure that all the touchpoints of your service are perfect and, just as importantly, that your organization can deliver a great service experience every time . It’s not just about designing the customer interactions; you also need to design the entire ecosystem surrounding those interactions.

In this course, you’ll learn how to go through a robust service design process and which methods to use at each step along the way. You’ll also learn how to create a service design culture in your organization and set up a service design team . We’ll provide you with lots of case studies to learn from as well as interviews with top designers in the field. For each practical method, you’ll get downloadable templates that guide you on how to use the methods in your own work.

This course contains a series of practical exercises that build on one another to create a complete service design project . The exercises are optional, but you’ll get invaluable hands-on experience with the methods you encounter in this course if you complete them, because they will teach you to take your first steps as a service designer. What’s equally important is that you can use your work as a case study for your portfolio to showcase your abilities to future employers! A portfolio is essential if you want to step into or move ahead in a career in service design.

Your primary instructor in the course is Frank Spillers . Frank is CXO of award-winning design agency Experience Dynamics and a service design expert who has consulted with companies all over the world. Much of the written learning material also comes from John Zimmerman and Jodi Forlizzi , both Professors in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University and highly influential in establishing design research as we know it today.

You’ll earn a verifiable and industry-trusted Course Certificate once you complete the course. You can highlight it on your resume, CV, LinkedIn profile or on your website.

All open-source articles on Design Research

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Design Research Unit: 1942–72

• November 2011
• Design and Culture 3(3):395-399
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Design Research Unit

The Design Research Unit (DRU) was Britain’s first consultancy to draw together expertise in architecture, graphics, and industrial design.

The Design Research Unit (DRU) was formed in 1943 by poet and art critic Herbert Read, advertising entrepreneur Marcus Brumwell, architect Misha Black, and graphic designer Milner Gray. It was acquired by architectural practice Scott Brownrigg in 2004.

The firm’s founding documents fittingly claimed, “Like every aspect of modern industry, design should be a co-operative activity.” Here’s a small selection of design work from the renowned collective.

DRU’s most well-known logo is for British Rail. In 1965, British Railways, as it was then known, engaged DRU to deliver its soon-to-be-ubiquitous mark. The logo, evoking two train tracks with arrows pointing in opposite directions, was created by designer Gerry Barney (who also worked on the design of the Guinness harp ).

Design Research Unit: the firm that branded Britain , on The Guardian . DRU , on Wikipedia. From bombs to brands , on Eye Magazine.

Header image courtesy of Mike Ashworth on Flickr .

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Richard Rogers: An Appreciation

We may not soon see another centre pompidou or lloyd’s, but rogers’s influence will be long-felt.

With his retirement at age 87 from the firm Rogers, Stirk, Harbour + Partners ( RSHP ), Richard Rogers ends one of the most storied careers in recent architecture.

That career began in the mid-1960s and was driven from the start by Rogers’s thoroughly modern faith in architecture’s ability to deliver a better future through legibly efficient, flexible, and equitable buildings and public spaces. His practice matured in the 1970s in collaboration with Renzo Piano , with whom he completed the celebrated Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1977, as modern architecture was coming under attack by postmodern critics including Charles Jencks , who saw the modern project as all but exhausted. As many of his contemporaries developed postmodern tastes ranging from anachronistic historicism to quotation-rich eclecticism to theory-fueled radicalism, Rogers held firm to his commitment to clarity, precision, and rigor, delivering through the end of the 20th century and well into this one unswervingly modern buildings, including the Lloyd’s of London headquarters (1986), the Millennium Dome in London (1999), the Barajas Airport Terminal 4 in Madrid (2005), and Three World Trade Center in New York (2018), which stand as testaments to the enduring validity of the tenets of the modern movement.

Born to Anglo-Italian parents in Florence in 1933, Rogers was raised from the age of six in England. As a young boarding-school student he struggled with depression, no doubt aggravated by dyslexia, which went undiagnosed until adulthood. On a 1953 visit to the Milan studio of his cousin, the architect Ernesto Rogers of the firm BBPR, Rogers tried his hand—with disappointing results—at architectural drawing. Undeterred, he enrolled the following year at the Architectural Association School (AA) in London.

At the AA, Rogers witnessed an energetic retrenchment in modern architectural thinking led by young faculty including Alan Colquhoun, Peter Smithson, and James Stirling, and reinforced by the more established Robert Furneaux Jordan, whose placement of social progress among the primary aims of the modern movement left an indelible mark on the young student.

After graduating in 1959, Rogers and his new wife, Su, set sail for America for further study at Yale in 1961. There, Rogers was impressed by the historian Vincent Scully, whose spirited lectures had already become legendary; inspired by the architecture of Louis Kahn , whose Yale Art Gallery at the time also housed the architecture studios, and intimidated by the rigorous studio culture imposed by the dean, Paul Rudolph , which starkly contrasted the more relaxed atmosphere to which he had grown accustomed in London. His discomfort with the workload was lessened by friendship with another talented British student, Norman Foster , with whom Rogers collaborated on a skillfully executed campus plan in Rudolph’s studio. While in New Haven, the two grew friendly with Stirling, by then teaching at Yale, and made occasional whiskey-fueled trips with him to take in the architectural sights of New York City.

Upon graduation, the Rogerses and Foster traveled cross country to study firsthand the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe , and on the West Coast had an eye-opening encounter with the work of Case Study architects such as Charles and Ray Eames and Craig Ellwood. After a brief stint working in offices in San Francisco (Rogers at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill ), the three returned to London in 1963 to join forces with another young architect, Wendy Cheesman (whom Foster would later marry), to launch their own firm, Team 4.

In early projects, the young architects struggled to achieve the tectonic precision they desired in traditional construction materials. A breakthrough came with Reliance Controls, commissioned on Stirling’s recommendation, and completed in 1967. The scale of the project allowed Team 4 to employ a welded steel frame, which they braced with distinctive (though not always structurally necessary) diagonal tension rods and left exposed throughout. Within, an open, flexible plan broke down hierarchical distinctions between blue- and white-collar workers, with a fully glazed rear facade allowing for a planned expansion to the north. Hinting at the overt mechanical imagery and subtle historical quotations that would color Rogers’s later work, the young architects cheekily located, at the center of the otherwise blank street facade, a mechanical exhaust flue and a steel-framed water tower reminiscent of the one deployed by Alison and Peter Smithson at their influential Hunstanton School of 1954.

Upon completion of Reliance Controls, Team 4 was dissolved and Richard and Su Rogers launched their own practice. Notable projects of the period include studies for prefabricated Zip-Up enclosures, extensible, open-planned buildings constructed of room-sized, aluminum-skinned rings that integrated walls, floors, and ceilings into continuous structural units joined end-to-end with neoprene gaskets. The couple tested the concept in their design for a futuristic rooftop addition to the Design Research Unit’s London offices, completed in 1971.

That same year, Rogers joined forces with Renzo Piano to prepare a competition entry for an ambitious cultural center on the Plateau Beaubourg in Paris. Echoing the exuberant imagery of recent projects by the Archigram group and the anything-goes flexibility of Cedric Price’s unrealized Fun Palace of 1964, the two proposed an immersive, adaptable environment which, they claimed in 1977 (in the unmistakable lingo of the 1960s), “allows people freedom to do their own things.” That rubric of freedom permeated the design, both inside and out: the interior was defined by uninterrupted 558 x 157-foot floor plates (realized with input from Peter Rice of Ove Arup), while the generous exterior plaza drew energy from the cross-braced steel framework and exposed mechanical equipment of the building’s monumental six-story facade.

Though the building was widely celebrated, it did not convince everyone. Editors at the Architectural Review described “a menacing building which stands like a man in full armour in a room full of civilians.” Jencks, for his part, was more charitable. In his influential anti-modern polemic, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture , published the year the complex opened, he found the “poetry of process” at Beaubourg “exhilarating without being wildly inappropriate or surreal.” Soon after, Jencks would coin the phrase “late modern” to account for the work of architects like Rogers whose persistent modernism was too formidable to be dismissed.

Of course, it was a different stylistic label, High Tech, that would come to adhere more tenaciously to Rogers’s work. That term gained currency among architectural journalists in the early 1980s to describe a tendency of Rogers, Piano, Foster, and others to trade in expressive mechanical imagery, exposed structure and mechanical systems, and surfaces rendered in polished metal or deeply saturated blues, yellows, greens, and reds, not to mention the electric pink to which Rogers later gravitated in his work and his wardrobe.

Regardless of these similarities, High Tech is notable for the sheer variety of visual qualities the phrase purports to gather under its terminological umbrella. Piano, for example, reveled in complexly articulated connections like those his 1984 IBM traveling pavilion, while Foster often favored slick, minimal surfaces, as in his masterful Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters of 1974. Rogers, for his part, delighted in contrasting thin tensile members and skeletal trusses with bulky exposed ductwork and air handling equipment, as he did in the PA Technology Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey; the Inmos Microprocessor factory in New South Wales (both completed in 1982); and in his masterpiece of the period, the Lloyd’s of London headquarters of 1986. Here, with a wink to the building’s proto-modern ancestor, Joseph Paxton’s 1851 Crystal Palace, Rogers capped the soaring atrium with a glazed barrel vault that gives the entire project a surprising whiff of Victorian revivalism (or is it postmodern quotation?) that slyly undercuts High Tech’s more typical futuristic allusions.

Of course, like his former partners (Rogers and Piano parted ways soon after Beaubourg’s completion), Rogers was reluctant to embrace High Tech or any other stylistic label, professing throughout his career that his work was far more concerned with technical performance and the provision of well-planned public amenities than with consistent aesthetic aspirations. This tension between machine-like visual articulation and carefully integrated urban space came to a head in his 1982 competition entry for the extension to the National Gallery in London. Here, Rogers proposed a thoughtful redirection of vehicular traffic in the area to allow a pedestrian arcade beneath the building to link Trafalgar and Leicester Squares. The strength of his urban ambitions was lost in the ensuing public debates, and the commission went to Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates.

Chastened, perhaps, but not discouraged, Rogers carried on. His practice grew steadily through the ensuing decades and was rechristened Rogers, Stirk, Harbour + Partners in 2007. Projects at all scales, from private residences to airports, earned Rogers and the firm just about every prize the field has to offer, including the RIBA Gold Medal in 1985, the Stirling Prize in 2006 (for the Barajas Airport terminal) and again in 2009 (for the Maggie’s West London Centre), the Pritzker Prize in 2007, and the AIA Gold Medal last year . In 1991, Rogers was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Five years later he was granted life peerage as Baron Rogers of Riverside.

With his titles came considerable political influence. In 1998, as chair of the Urban Task Force, he was commissioned by the British government to study sustainable, equitable development strategies for a future U.K. His team produced “Towards an Urban Renaissance,” a white paper that became a template for government planning policy, later updated and published as Towards a Strong Urban Renaissance in 2005. “Urban design and planning can manage the dynamism of towns and cities to tackle social problems and achieve social inclusion,” Rogers claimed in a 2002 speech on his work with the Task Force. He went on to profess “a deeply rooted love of cities, a belief that cities can be made sustainable, and the conviction that we cannot survive without sustainable cities.”

That love of the urban realm, coupled with a relentlessly modern commitment to imagine better ways for it to function, has kept Richard Rogers at the forefront of our field for half a century. Though we may not soon see another instance of mechanistic exuberance on the order of Centre Pompidou or Lloyd’s, we can be sure that he and his work will continue to exert a profound influence on the hearts and minds of forward-thinking architects for generations to come.

Todd Gannon is Robert S. Livesey Professor and head of the architecture section at The Ohio State University’s Knowlton School. In 2017, he published the monograph Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech .

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Walther König, Köln/Koenig Books (April 30, 2012)
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A look at the origins of the Defense Innovation Unit

Written by two of the agency's early leaders, Raj Shah and Chris Kirchhoff, a new book details the beginning days of the Defense Innovation Unit.

A new book details the beginning days of the Defense Innovation Unit. Written by two of the agency’s early leaders, Raj Shah and Chris Kirchhoff, Unit X tells the story of those who were there to establish DIU, which acts as a go between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon. One of the main characters is Lauren Dailey, who at the time was DIU’s director of acquisitions, where she discovered how the agency could construct contracts that would be more attractive to tech firms. Federal News Network’s executive producer Eric White recently had the chance to speak with her about it and how everything came together, on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin .

Interview transcript: 

Eric White  Why don’t we just start from the beginning? It was kind of an interesting path that got you to DIUx. And you know, it’s a small defense agency. How did you find yourself in that position that you just mentioned?

Lauren Dailey  I had been working in the Pentagon as a member of the Army acquisition workforce as a civilian, working in ASAALT, which is Army acquisition headquarters, for several years. And I had heard about DIUx and was interested in the mission, right? Hey, we’re gonna try and reconnect DoD with Silicon Valley. And, I knew, as an acquisition person, that was really interesting to me, right? How do we help engage the way that DoD does business with Silicon Valley? And, so, I raised my hand, I volunteered and said, hey, I would love to interview for this job. Interviewed for it, got it, and then moved from D.C. out to San Francisco.

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Eric White  Alright, so let’s set the scene. You get, at DIUx, as you just mentioned, it is tasked with connecting the Pentagon with Silicon Valley. And, other tech companies, we’ll say. For the purposes of this interview, we’ll just keep referring to it as Silicon Valley. What is it that you see as the initial problem and the disconnect between those two entities?

Lauren Dailey  Absolutely. So, when I got there, right, I think I was employee, like, number five or six, maybe. So, we were very, very small, still getting commercial Internet set up in our office, right? So, very scrappy, very startup-like, and for the first, I would say, about six months that I was there, our mission was, hey, we’re gonna go find these really cool tech companies, we’re going to connect them back with DoD customers. Magic is gonna happen. They’re going to work together. It’s going to be amazing. And, obviously, it’s not quite that easy and it doesn’t work that way. And, so, what we found was that a lot of DoD customers were very excited about working with these companies and these technologies, but they just couldn’t get them on contract quickly enough so that the companies wouldn’t lose interest or say, you know what, you’re not really serious, you’re not willing to put your money where your mouth is, we’re gonna go focus our BD efforts on other clients. And, so, as the acquisition lead, right, they turned to me and said, hey, we need to figure out a way to actually get these companies money. We need to be able to get them on contract and do business quickly at the speed of business, at the speed of Silicon Valley. How are we going to do that?

Eric White  It’s kind of a different situation for the Pentagon that it’s used to, because usually, it’s the companies that they work for rely on the Pentagon for their business. Not the case with these tech companies that are saying, you know, hey, if we don’t do business with the government, we’ll just go off in another direction. What was it kind of adjusting to that? You know, coming from the Army, where you’re just such a massive cash cow for most of these companies to, yeah, you know, we might do business with you.

Lauren Dailey  Well, the way that I thought about it was that DoD has traditionally been a monopsony, right? So, the single buyer of things, like tanks, aircraft carriers, missiles, right? And, so, they’re used to having all of that buying power, right, and using that buying power, that single buyer. But when you look at the commercial technology market in Silicon Valley, not only is DoD not the single buyer, but in a lot of times, they’re not even an important minority buyer. And, so, you’re facing not just different types of technologies that you’re trying to buy, but a fundamentally very different market with different market conditions where you’re in a different market position. And, so, you have to very fundamentally change the way that DoD thinks about doing business with these companies and their place in this market in order for them to be able to effectively work in this ecosystem.

Eric White That brings us up to the point of what we’re talking about today. Enter the commercial solutions opening that you were able to discover through poring through mountains and mountains of acquisition law. Why don’t you tell me about that discovery, and actually kind of define that for us as well?

Lauren Dailey  Commercial solutions opening is what I created for DIU. That was using OTA authorities, right? Other Transaction Agreements, which are not new themselves, right? They go back to the to the 1950s. But there was this new language that had come out just that year, that said, hey, if you have a successful prototype OTA, you can move directly into production without having to do another competition. And, so, that was really attractive and interest interesting to us, right? Hey, if we find these promising companies, and we can prototype and demonstrate their capabilities, at least from a contractual perspective, they can move right to scale to production, right? They can hop that valley of death and scale immediately. So, we were really excited about that. But I think it wasn’t just that. It was also, how do we create a business process, that, like I said, mirrors more of what Silicon Valley is used to, right? And there were kind of three fundamental tenets of that that we looked at. One was fast, right? We needed to be able to move quickly. We couldn’t take 12, 18 months to get a particular company and contract. We need to move quickly at the speed of business. Second was flexible, right? These companies in this ecosystem is used to being able to negotiate contracts, right? It can’t be, here’s 100-page government contract, and you have to sign every provision, right? We need to be able to negotiate and make the contract fit the need of what we were buying. And third, and most importantly in my mind, was collaborative, right? Rather than the government setting, here’s all these requirements that we’re going to set all by ourselves, and then give you the detailed requirements, you have to go build that. We wanted to create an environment where the government could say, here’s our problem. And industry could really come and say, here’s all of our different possible solutions. Let’s collaborate together to design the scope of work to design the project. Let’s get the people who know the problem best, right, these warfighters,  in the same room with the people that know these solutions best, the engineers from these companies, and have them sit down together and create what this project is. And that’s what the commercial solutions opening allowed us to do.

Eric White  We’re speaking with Lauren Dailey. She’s a senior manager with Deloitte, but first and former acquisition director for the Defense Innovation Unit. Yeah, you’re really speaking the Silicon Valley’s language there, because, you know, at least from what I’ve seen and heard about the culture surrounding those tech companies, it’s all about action and getting things moving and avoiding that valley of death, as you mentioned. Can you, and I don’t expect you to know the litany of them, but were there any projects that stick out that you were all were able to help get off the ground using this process?

Lauren Dailey  One of the early ones was a company called Shield AI that makes these quadcopters that will fly around inside and spaces and check things out, right.? And this was interesting, because it was a company who was actually trying to sell to DoD, right? A lot, most, obviously, startups are trying to sell primarily to commercial companies. They really knew that they had a DoD use case, and they wanted to sell to us. But they were having trouble before they came to DIU on how to raise money, because all of their investors were saying, no, sorry, you know, this isn’t a good path to revenue, we’re not willing to invest in you because we don’t see DoD as a viable future for our company. We got really excited about their technology, especially in some interesting special operations cases, put them through the process. They competed, they were awarded an OTA from the from our CSO, I want to say within a month, it was pretty quick. And after that, after they were doing that prototype, they were able to take that back to their investors in the venture capital community and say, look, look how quickly we were able to get a contract from DoD. And guess what? There was immediate investment from their investors that came to follow. Because they said they looked at the CSO process and said, oh, DoD actually can move money quickly and willing to partner with these companies. We as investors will also follow up on that. So, that was really validating from, you know, a dual ecosystem perspective.

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Eric White  You just mentioned kind of the feeling around working with the Pentagon changed. How has CSO had an effect on DIUx’s mission overall? How happy were your superiors when you you showed them this method? Did it make things easier? And you know, if you can, from an outsider perspective, and still an acquisition professional yourself, how, what is it, where has it left DIU today?

Lauren Dailey  So, yeah, and you can read about it in Raj and Chris’s new book called Unit X, right, where they they tell the story of this, but once we had the CSO in place, then it was really, you know, floodgates open, we now have a way to actually demonstrate that DoD can put money on contracts in a fast, flexible, collaborative mechanism that can demonstrate we were here to actually work with Silicon Valley. And that really opened the floodgates for all of the work that DIU has done then and since, right,? The vast majority of their projects they put through the CSO still today and then spread even beyond DIU to all other components of DoD, which is really exciting to see.

Eric White  Final question, I just want to pick your brain as an acquisition \professional, because since the commercial solutions opening isn’t OTA itself, we’ve actually got you at a good time, because there’s a bit of news about OTAs, what with a recent court ruling saying that they might be liable to bid protests and also there’s a provision in the most recent Senate NDAA saying that they want to create a committee to study the use of OTAs just because of the rising use of them and the way that acquisition press professionals like yourself, like to use them because of that simplicity and moving things faster. What do you see as the future of OTAs? And if changes are made to it, is it still going to be an effective approach for the government overall, to get those business deals moving quicker?

Lauren Dailey  In my mind, the tool is only as good as the artist using it, right? We’ve seen OTAs be used really well. We’ve seen them be used really poorly, and to the point where they’re actually slower than traditional processes. On the other hand, we’ve seen amazing contracting officers and acquisition professionals use FAR-based contracts in really unique and creative ways that gets them to act quickly and flexibly and work with these kinds of companies, right? So, I think it’s less about OTA versus FAR and more about how do we help make sure that DoD and our acquisition workforce have the permission to take risks to do something differently, to change the way they fundamentally approach business relationships to work effectively with Silicon Valley and commercial companies that don’t traditionally work with DoD? And no matter what tool you use, as long as you have I think, that approach and that that cultural distinction, I think you’ll be able to create business processes that enable DoD to work effectively with the Valley.

Eric White  Yeah. And that’s such a good point, because it does take the workforce, you know, in your mind, having a steady pipeline of creative professionals like yourself entering the acquisition space. What can be done to maintain that and make sure that, like I said, folks like yourself who kind of think outside the box aren’t just going straight to Silicon Valley in places that usually harbor that kind of talent?

Lauren Dailey  Absolutely. So, I think it comes down to a couple of things, right? One is risk tolerance, right? And that really comes from leadership throughout all different levels of DoD, and an industry has to be able to say, yes, we want to, we do want to do this differently, and we give our teams permission to do that, right? In the case of the CSO, right? It was Raj and Chris as my immediate supervisors, right, but really all the way up to the Secretary of Defense, who was briefed on this, Ash Carter at the time, and said, this is great. This is what we need and move forward on it, right? So, having that leadership top cover I think helps people feel like they can take risks and do something differently to change the way the DoD does business. So, always exciting to see that.

Eric White  Lauren Dailey is a senior manager for Deloitte and former acquisition director for the Defense Innovation Unit. Find this interview at our website, go to federalnewsnetwork.com/federaldrive. You can also subscribe to the Federal Drive wherever you get your podcasts.

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Development of power-delay product optimized asic-based computational unit for medical image compression.

1. Introduction

• A DCT/IDCT architecture based on the Loeffler algorithm by incorporating the computational unit to perform the additions involved in the butterfly diagram using the ET adders and the low-power multipliers for the multiplications involved.
• An improved encoding and decoding block is used to reduce the circuit complexity and improve the compression ratio, SSIM, and PSNR without affecting the quality of the reconstructed image.
• An approach to building a computational unit by integrating VLSI ASIC design and the concepts of low-power VLSI compatible for medical image compression used in telemedicine was adopted in this research.

2. VLSI ASIC Design Flow

3. development of the proposed computational unit, 3.1. modified csla-based adders using error tolerant adders.

3.2. Multiplier Based on Divide and Conquer Approach

3.3. PDP Optimized Multiplier Using Iterative Carry Save SBETA

3.4. logic unit using operand isolation, 3.5. application of the proposed computational unit for medical image compression, 4. results and discussion, implementation of the proposed architecture for image processing application, 5. conclusions, author contributions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, acknowledgments, conflicts of interest, list of abbreviations.

• Roy, K.; Prasad, S.C. Low-Power CMOS VLSI Circuit Design ; John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, NJ, USA, 2009. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lachireddy, D.; Ramesh, S. Power and delay efficient alu using vedic multiplier. In Advances in Electrical and Computer Technologies: Select Proceedings of ICAECT 2019 ; Springer: Coimbatore, India, 2020; pp. 703–711. [ Google Scholar ]
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Mendez, T.; Parupudi, T.; Kedlaya K, V.; Nayak, S.G. Development of Power-Delay Product Optimized ASIC-Based Computational Unit for Medical Image Compression. Technologies 2024 , 12 , 121. https://doi.org/10.3390/technologies12080121

Mendez T, Parupudi T, Kedlaya K V, Nayak SG. Development of Power-Delay Product Optimized ASIC-Based Computational Unit for Medical Image Compression. Technologies . 2024; 12(8):121. https://doi.org/10.3390/technologies12080121

Mendez, Tanya, Tejasvi Parupudi, Vishnumurthy Kedlaya K, and Subramanya G. Nayak. 2024. "Development of Power-Delay Product Optimized ASIC-Based Computational Unit for Medical Image Compression" Technologies 12, no. 8: 121. https://doi.org/10.3390/technologies12080121

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Crafting host materials for narrowband blue OLEDs with low efficiency roll-off by the medium-ring strategy

• Communications
• Published: 23 July 2024

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• Yuanyuan Bao 1 ,
• Anping Luo 1 ,
• Jingbo Lan 1 ,
• Junjie Liu 1 ,
• Zhengyang Bin 1 &
• Jingsong You 1  

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The pursuit of high-performance narrowband blue organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) is of paramount importance in both academic research and industrial applications. While obvious strides have been made in the design of narrowband blue emitters, the development of appropriate host materials has evidently trailed behind. Herein, we introduce a medium-ring strategy for crafting host molecules based on the heptagonal tribenzo[ b,d,f ]azepine (TBA) unit. The twisted three-dimensional (3D) architecture of the TBA framework not only endows the host molecules with fast hole-transporting pathways but also effectively reduces exciton quenching. Equipped with two TBA units, DTBA, synthesized with ease, demonstrates a huge horizontal orientation factor ( Θ // ) of 93.5% and a broad emission spectrum for accelerating the energy transfer process in the emitting layer, which contributes to enhancing device performance. We have fabricated high-performance narrowband blue OLEDs using DTBA as the host, FIrpic as the phosphor sensitizer, and the widely used boron-nitrogen-containing multiple resonance emitter BCz-BN. These devices exhibit a maximum external quantum efficiency (EQE max ) as high as 31.0% with an impressively low-efficiency roll-off. Even at a high luminance level of 10,000 cd m −2 , the EQE value remains noteworthy at 20.3%, marking a significant advancement in BCz-BN-based devices.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22031007, 22275127). We thank Dr. Jing Li (Sichuan University) for the assistance with NMR measurements.

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Yuanyuan Bao, Anping Luo, Jingbo Lan, Junjie Liu, Zhengyang Bin & Jingsong You

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Bao, Y., Luo, A., Lan, J. et al. Crafting host materials for narrowband blue OLEDs with low efficiency roll-off by the medium-ring strategy. Sci. China Chem. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11426-024-2057-7

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Received : 08 March 2024

Accepted : 22 April 2024

Published : 23 July 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11426-024-2057-7

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