Louis and Jeanette Brooks Engineering Design Center

The purpose of the Louis and Jeanette Brooks Engineering Design Center is to emphasize the centrality of design in engineering by providing a physical focus for that activity. This center is an industrial-strength facility making available the tools, information and services that students and faculty engaged in design projects or design research require at the point of need. Interdisciplinary in character, the center was conceived to create a synergy of powerful computers, good software and people: students, faculty, engineers from industry, business people, artists, architects and even poets.

In combination with the school’s Forrest Wade Rapid Prototyping Laboratory, the Andrew Labowsky Sr. Materials Engineering Laboratory and the Acoustics Laboratory, the Design Center emphasizes hands-on, real-life experience through the design and building of real products for real customers in conditions similar to those found in the best industrial practice. In combination with the Multimedia Presentation Room/Theater and the Gallery, it offers in its 3,000 square feet, an opportunity to explore new dimensions of design.

Specific features of the Design Center include:

  • The design studio, where four clusters of seven workstations are connected to printers and a plotter. It is also visually integrated and networked with the Forrest Wade Rapid Prototyping Laboratory across the Gallery.
  • Four design carrels, each equipped with table, chairs, a videoconferencing set, a monitor, and power and information terminals for laptops, can accommodate design groups of up to five or six people for design reviews or conferences. These carrels, acoustically isolated from the design studio, can be accessed from the studio or directly from the gallery. They also communicate with one another.
  • The Multimedia Presentation Room/Theater is an auditorium/ lecture room able to accommodate 40 people comfortably. Fully equipped with cameras for videotaping presentations and audiovisual and computer facilities, it features high-resolution rear projection so that an adequate level of lighting may be maintained for the audience. Outlets for laptop computers are available.

    Since opening in February of 1998, the Jeanette and Louis Brooks Engineering Design Center has been in continuous use. The Brooks Center provides an excellent facility for high-end multimedia presentations, building on the earlier success of the Driscoll Multimedia Room. When classes are not being taught in the computer studio area, students, staff, and faculty make extensive use of the facilities. Faculty of the Art, Architecture Schools as well as the Humanities and Social Sciences Department also benefit from the varied facilities and look to schedule classes in the Brooks Center.

    Students, faculty and staff use high end engineering workstations from Sun, Silicon Graphics, IBM and Dell. Also popular are the Apple Macintosh G3 computers. All computers are equipped with twenty inch or larger high-resolution color displays, some with stereo visualization capabilities. Most computers have sound capture and playback capabilities and also offer CD-Rom or DVD/Rom drives fro multimedia software.

    The Brooks Center is busy outside of the Fall and Spring semesters. Summer internship programs offer young minds a chance to experience the wonders of science and engineering with the guidance of skilled professionals and motivated engineering students. The EID102 course, Introduction to Programming, is offered to incoming freshman engineering students in the summer preceding their freshman year. This intensive course teaches students basic programming skills as well as introducing the concepts of programmatic drawing in both two and three dimensions.

    As of April 5, 2000, the following software is available for student use in the Brooks Center. Many of the software titles can be used remotely as well as locally.

    Operating systems:

    windows 95/98/nt 4.0

    linux 2.0/2.2

    macOs 8.5 solaris 6/7

    irix 6.3/6.4/6.5

    aix 4.1/4.3

    Applications and Application Suites:

    Cadence

    Cadence Design Systems, Inc. CATIA

    IBM/Desault Systems Form/Z

    Autodessys, Inc. Microsoft Office

    Microsoft Visual Studio (Visual Basic, C++, Java)

    Microsoft Oracle Server

    Oracle Pro-II, Provision

    Simulation Sciences SAP2000

    CSI (Computers and Structures, Inc.) LARSA Standard Nonlinear

    LARSA Staad/Pro

    Research Engineers, Inc. Pro/Engineer

    Parametric Technology Corporation Hec

    U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Autocad

    Autodesk, Inc. Houdini

    		Side Effects Software Group, Inc. Microstation

    Bentley Systems, Inc. Modflow

    Scientific Software Group, Inc. Storyspace

    East Gate Systems, Inc. Photoshop

    Adobe Illustrator

    Adobe

    Freely Available Software: Adobe Acrobat Reader

    Netscape – Web Browser

    Mozilla – Open source web browser IE – Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser

    VNC – Virtual Network Computing

    Gimp – image editor GCC

    G++

    EGCS G77

    GHOSTVIEW

    GHOSTSCRIPT TTSH

    SSH

    VIM EMACS

    Cooper Union Developed Software: Sinstall/Xinstall

    Automated System Installation Tool uam

    Distributed Authorization, Single Login System unfutz

    Automated System Restoration

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