Did you ever say to yourself, "What a brilliant idea! How did they come up with that?" One school of thought holds that the best "aha" moments take place when someone’s alone. However, another theory—shared by organizations such as NASA and LEGO—is that a problem shared is a problem solved.

When we design, build, test, and deliver software, it is imperative that we provide our users with what they need—not what we want, but what that they want. We need to understand the scope and breadth of the user base. Here are three questions to ask to learn more about how users experience your software.

Origami is no longer limited to folding a sheet of paper into a crane. Now there’s Interactive Robogami, a new system under development from researchers at MIT that gives those of us who are neither a roboticist nor a mechanical engineer the tools to design our own robots.