Engineering Commons^™

The Smithvent Experience And A Framework For Collaborative Distributed Design And Fabrication, Susannah Howe, Eleanor C. Ory, Devin Carroll, Sarah Chu, Kalifa Clarke, Beatrix Dalton, Claire Dudek, Adrienne Horne, Nicholas Howe, Sangye Kazi, Astrid Landeau, Dan Lin, Phoebe Degroot, Emily Dixon, Farida Sabry, Alex Widstrand

Engineering: Faculty Publications

This paper addresses the collaborative journey of the SmithVent team, a 30-person distributed group of volunteers, who designed, fabricated, and tested a simplified and cost-efficient ventilator over a three-month period, and won the CoVent19 Challenge in July 2020. The paper first presents the SmithVent experience through a co-constructed narrative that describes the team’s approaches to collaborative distributed design and fabrication. The paper next reviews frameworks from five theoretical lenses and then details the process of extracting, synthesizing, and organizing relevant factors to create a new and emergent framework reflective of the SmithVent experience. Lastly, the paper discusses educational implications of …