The Journal of Mechanical Design (JMD) serves the broad design community as the venue for scholarly, archival research in all aspects of the design activity with emphasis on design synthesis. JMD has traditionally served the ASME Design Engineering Division and its technical committees, but it welcomes contributions from all areas of design with emphasis on synthesis. JMD communicates original contributions, primarily in the form of research articles of considerable depth, but also technical briefs, design innovation papers, book reviews, and editorials.