During the summer of 2007, four faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University hosted a design research summer school for students in the pre-proposal stage of their doctoral work.

The NSF-funded summer school was taught by Mary Shaw and Jim Herbsleb from the
faculty of Computer Science, Susan Finger from the faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Institute of Complex Engineered Systems, and Mark D Gross from the School of Architecture. The summer school was funded by the NSF’s “Science of Design” initiative, as a “community building activity”.

The summer school had two goals: The first goal was to help PhD students who are
working in fields related to “Science of Design” to better understand strategies for conducting research on, in, and about design. The second goal of the summer school was to build a community of researchers working in various design domains by nurturing cross-disciplinary collaboration.