Eremenko serves as the director of Project Ara, which has a goal of building a smartphone with interlocking components.

During his presentation, he walked students through one way in which engineers design complex systems. His advice is to begin with the project requirements and objectives, and then deconstruct those into parts and smaller units before integrating everything back together and adjusting for side effects or bug fixes.

Specific to Project Ara, Eremenko spoke about the initial reaction to the prototype - "It has no soul" - which he took personally. However, the criticism pushed him and the team to work harder. They eventually were inspired by the Japanese bento box. From there, Eremenko says they added some Art Deco aspects to the design.

When asked by a student how much of the Project Ara work is done in teams, he responded, "everything is done in teams." Eremenko described the structure as having "a small team of five or six 'Googlers' that oversees the big picture and has final say" and then approximately 20 different partners, including large and small firms and academic teams - one of which is at Purdue - working on different aspects of the smartphone.

"We make it work through the wonders of video conferencing," he said, citing the global nature of the teams' locations, adding that "the goal is to get everyone to feel they're part of Project Ara and not of their parent group."

Eremenko left the students with some advice based on what he has learned along the way from starting out as an aerospace engineer. Those tips include having an analytical framework for problems you're trying to solve, creating incentives to overcome risk aversion, and favoring an open process for ecosystems, information flow and design work, which he thinks is almost always better than having a closed one.