Place and Time - Sustainable Design: The Science of Sustainability and Green Engineering - page 180

As discussed in Chapter 3, numerous industrial, commercial, and governmental
green initiatives are under way: notably design for the environment, design for
disassembly, and design for recycling. 24 These are replacing or at least changing
pollution control paradigms. The call for improved design approaches is leading
not only to fewer toxics leaving pipes, vents, and stacks, but also to improvements
to the financial bottom line. Most sustainable design approaches, such as life-cycle
analysis, prioritizing the most important problems, and matching the technologies
and operations to address them, are a means to improving efficiencies. But green
thinking goes well beyond improved efficiencies. In fact, finding more effective
means of carrying out a function is a better view.
Examples of changing focus from prototypes to function are abundant. Let us
consider the burgeoning area of entertainment. A couple of decades ago, if you
wanted to be entertained by seeing a movie, you had two choices. You could
see a new movie in a theater or you could wait a few years and see the same
movie, in edited form, on your television set. Next, video players were made
widely available, so a new option emerged. You could go to the video store and
rent a recent (but not new) movie and watch it in the privacy of your home.
Although this was a new means of viewing the video, it was really not a change
in function but a modification of an existing design. In fact, most ways to see a
movie—that is, the function of motion picture watching—have not changed. We
saw improvements in presentation (e.g., improved sound systems, high-definition
technologies, and recording capabilities), but not in the function itself.
This is an example of keeping the prototype but not substantially changing
the function. To change the function, we have to rethink the entire concept
of motion picture entertainment. For example, the same function can be im-
proved by choosing Earth-friendly materials in building the theater, improving
its HVAC system to be more energy efficient, even using media with fewer toxics
(e.g., eliminating silver-based films). However, a truly new function might be
to eliminate the need to drive to the theater in the first place. If we can find a
way to bring the movie to the individual viewer in just as good a quality as in
the theater, we have changed the function not merely the presentation. Some of
the emerging entertainment technologies are approaching this, such as I-Pod and
other players.
With the change in function, there are often unintended consequences. For
instance, would we exacerbate the desocializing or even antisocial behaviors
that have accompanied video games and private entertainment systems? Are
there unexpected risks? Too often, breakthroughs are met with uneven risks to
certain members of society, such as children, minority groups, and compromised
subpopulations. This is not meant to discourage innovation, only to consider all
possible outcomes.
Historically, environmental considerations have been approached by engineers
as constraints on their designs. For example, hazardous substances generated
by a manufacturing process were dealt with as a waste stream that must be