This section should be no more than three (3) pages in the format provided, including a small quantity of graphics that are the most useful to conveying your background knowledge.  It is a summary of the Individual Background Research B-Sheets compiled in Appendix A of your Technical Archive Document (TAD).  This section is extremely important and approval of the PUD will not be given until the team is judged to have a sufficient understanding of the problem domain in terms of content described here.

Note that the next section of the PUD will get into specifics of engineering requirements as defined by you by translating information of needs and wants from your customer into engineering requirements; engineering requirements should not be covered here.

The Background Research Findings section must demonstrate your cumulative understanding of the problem domain and beyond and outside the problem domain (near-field and far-field discovery), not the problem itself (that is captured in the Project Overview, Current Situation, and then, as defined in engineering terms, in the Engineering Requirements later).  The remainder of this section should be concise text including paragraphs and, as appropriate, bullet-point lists.  It should cover highlights from the cumulative individual background research work of all team members.  It is up to your team how you want to organize the content; doing a good job of organizing it will take some good thinking from multiple team members.  Given the anticipated length of this section (more than a page or so), you should use subsections to organize groupings of content here (as long as you have two or more; one subheading/heading makes no sense).  Use paragraph style “Heading 3” for subheadings; getting numbering to work in Google Docs is far from straightforward, so samples are included for you to use (make a copy of one of those provided if more are needed).  There should be at least one, more likely 2-3, really important graphics worthy of inclusion.  However, leave most of the graphics to the B-Sheets in TAD Appendix A to be included with this document.  Remember, the strict page limit with graphics is three (3) pages!  And no adjusting font or paragraph formatting to cheat that!  In regard to the bio/nature-inspired discovery work, unless you really found something plausibly relevant and/or useful, do not cover that here (but do keep it in the TAD Appendix A pages).  Reiterating from earlier-section guidance, for the last time here, to help you place graphics in Google Docs with captions that remain attached, a link to a source having a figure+caption placeholder, a table+caption placeholder, and instructions for their use is linked via the comment on the cover page along with the link to this guidance.

This section should begin with this sentence that directs the reader to additional details of background research.  The template does so by providing a sentence “The full details of the raw background research may be found in Appendix A of the attached Technical Archive Document (TAD).  Highlights are summarized in the subsections that follow.”  Keep the sentence as is then begin writing in the next paragraph where it says “START HERE-BACKGROUND”.

Conclude this section with a brief paragraph focused on what you learned, overall and/or most importantly, and how (with specifics, not generalities) this learning/information will influence your work moving forward.  The template provides a lead-in sentence to this paragraph, stating “The most important elements of what we learned, and how that will influence our work moving forward, is summarized as follows.”  Keep that sentence and then add to it where it says by selecting “CONTINUE FINAL PARAGRAPH HERE” and typing.  You should demarcate the start of this paragraph with a subheading “Moving Forward.”  Note that this is not a “summary” of the preceding, but a brief coverage of what these findings mean to you moving forward.

Again, the page limit with graphics is three (3) pages!  And no adjusting font or paragraph formatting to cheat that!  At the same time, using less than three pages is likely falling short.  The challenge here should be how to convey a complete coverage of your background research findings — the highlights — that is also concise enough to fit in 3 pages.  In doing so, the graphics need not be huge, but they should be large enough to make out what is important in them.  And you can work text around the graphics as well to avoid losing piles of white space to the sides of the graphic.