How do you extract a vein from a patient's leg without creating a long and uncomfortable convalescence?

What goes up like a rocket, changes into a plane, then glides under controlled flight? For Christopher Wilkins ’05, Erik Palitsch ’05, Samuel Lee ’05, James Rollo ’05, and a team of Rensselaer students, it’s their senior capstone project. It’s called a morphing rocket—a rocket that changes inflight to an aircraft with wings and control surfaces to facilitate directed flight.

When the Albany Guardian Society (AGS), a senior advocacy group, wanted creative solutions to facilitate independent senior living, it chose to partner with Rensselaer and the O. T. Swanson Multidisciplinary Design Laboratory (MDL).

For the last five years, partners from outside Rensselaer — Fortune 500s, foundations, entrepreneurs—have brought their design problems to the O. T. Swanson Multidisciplinary Design Laboratory (MDL). The undergraduates who grapple with these problems benefit greatly from the experience.

“Undergraduate students simply do not study aerodynamics at the level needed to fully understand the operation of wind turbines,” said Bill Gressick, the lead research specialist at Rensselaer’s Center for Automation Technologies and Systems. “The team members thoroughly impressed me with their ability to overcome all obstacles.”

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been counted among the 60 "most forward-thinking design schools" in the world, according to BusinessWeek magazine's second annual survey of the best design schools around the globe. The ranking appears in the publication's Oct. 15 issue.

Something important is brewing in Rensselaer's O. T. Swanson Multidisciplinary Design Laboratory, a.k.a.THE DESIGN LAB - with the emphasis on design.

The mission of the O.T. Swanson Multidisciplinary Design Laboratory (THE DESIGN LAB) is to provide clinical real world experiences for students that build confidence and allow them to integrate discipline specific knowledge with practice on challenging multidisciplinary design projects.

Welcome to the THE DESIGN LAB. We've redesigned our website in order to accommodate everyone with a special interest in three user groups. One group is the potential new sponsor who will provide a learning experience to our students that will stay with them the rest of their lives. The second group are the students, who want to learn more about THE DESIGN LAB in order to be best prepared when they become apart of it. Thirdly is the academic community in general, who places a high value on teaching and learning.