• Menu
    • ASME
    The American Society of Mechanical Engineers

    Special Issue on Extreme Design – Navigating High Complexity and High Uncertainty in Engineering Design

    Journal of Mechanical Design
    Journal of Mechanical Design icon
    The engineering design community is confronting problems of unprecedented complexity and uncertainty. Climate change, autonomous systems, large-scale infrastructure needs, defense, security, and global health concerns are examples where traditional methods and approaches may not meet the needs of the problem. Extreme Design (XD) is emerging as a new research challenge that seeks to understand and advance design under such conditions (Marion et al., 2025). Extreme Design (XD) focuses on high-complexity, high-uncertainty challenges that extend beyond what is possible with conventional methodologies. XD emphasizes rapid iteration, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the development of adaptive processes, theories, and tools for problems that are hard to frame and resist conventional solution methods.

    While significant progress has been made in computational design, design cognition, and collaborative systems, a gap remains in explicitly addressing design approaches suited for environments and problem spaces with extreme complexity and uncertainty dynamics. This special issue will gather research that defines, theorizes, and demonstrates methods and practices for XD, providing a foundation for a new research framework within engineering design.

    Topic Areas

    THE SCOPE OF THIS ISSUE INCLUDES BUT IS NOT LIMITED TO:

    • Ultra-high complexity and/or scale (e.g., autonomous networks and systems, global climate change) 
    • Exceptionally poorly defined problems and/or systems (e.g., biodiversity loss, designing remedies for all human diseases and conditions)
    • Extremely large or sparse sets of data and/or stakeholders (e.g., managing massive virtual collaborations and interactions with participants and stakeholders, data from rare or anomalous occurrences, data from or engaging with extremely small populations) 
    • Extremely challenging requirements (multiple standard deviations from the norm) (e.g., designing machines that can operate for extremely long durations (i.e., operation for 100,000+ years)
    • Extreme environmental conditions (e.g., space, very cold or warm environments, deep sea, exceptionally low-resourced) 
    • Extremely large populations (e.g., urban population centers, social media networks)
    • Extremely high levels of iteration and experimentation (e.g., design autonomy, multi-scale prototyping, simulation of complex systems)

    Special Issue Publication Dates


    Paper submission deadline: July 1, 2026
    Initial review completed: September 15, 2026
    Publication date: March 2027

    Submission Instructions

    Papers should be submitted electronically to the journal through the ASME Journal Tool. If you already have an account, log in as an author and select Submit Paper. If you do not have an account, you can create one here. 

    Once at the Paper Submittal page, select the Journal of Mechanical Design, and then select the Special Issue on Extreme Design – Navigating High Complexity and High Uncertainty in Engineering Design.

    Papers received after the deadline or papers not selected for the Special Issue may be accepted for publication in a regular issue.

    Guest Editors

    Eric Brubaker, Virginia Tech, USA (bru@vt.edu)

    Madhurima Das, University of Melbourne, Australia (madhurima.das@unimelb.edu.au)

    Kathryn Jablokow, Manhattan University, USA (kathryn.jablokow@manhattan.edu)

    Tucker Marion, Northeastern University, USA (t.marion@northeastern.edu)

    Tahira Reid Smith, Penn State, USA (tpr5404@psu.edu)

    Maria Yang, MIT, USA (mcyang@mit.edu)