DARPA Cadet Team Collaborates with RISD

A multidisciplinary cadet design team assigned to a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) SquadX resupply project for the ME404 Mechanical Engineering Design course, conducted a collaborative design session with students from the Design, Culture, and Global Security course at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). This two-day event brought together USMA Cadets from Mechanical Engineering, Systems Engineering, Engineering Management and Defense Strategic Studies with foreign and domestic RISD industrial design students to frame a unique problem focused on dense urban environments. The cadets and students were organized into five teams that explored various functions related to sustaining a squad-sized element in an Eastern European city. The teams spent much of the afternoon conducting a terrain walk across the city of Providence to better understand the operating environment and specific system functions. As design students and residents of the city of Providence themselves, the RISD students provided a unique perspective on both the design process and urban patterns of life.