Sustainable Design and Social Responsibility - Sustainable Design: The Science of Sustainability and Green Engineering - page 215

System Boundaries (Design Decision Layers)

Industrial Ecology
(Industry/Industry
Interactions)

Cultural and Social
(Industry/Social
Interactions)
Example: Highway
system design

Design for Environment
(Gate to Gate)

Life-Cycle Analysis
(Cradle to Grave)

Example: Electric vs.
sasoline
Exposure to toxic
materials during
automobile recycling

Example: Road
construction

Example: Paint type

Toxic releases from
painting process

Particulate emissions from
concrete manaufacture

Land-use patterns

Life Sciences

Effects on road
construction on local
ecosystems

Environmental
Sciences

Demands on local
groundwater

Impervious cover, water
supply

Ore and fuel extraction

Material and disposal
costs
Patterns of use by
individual drivers

Effects on commercial
trade
Temporal and spatial
traffic patterns

Community business
development

Economics

Manufacturing costs
Consumer preferences,
aesthetics

Sociology and
Policy

Access to services

Humanities and
Aesthetics

Color Upholstry durability Designs for fleets Roadside landscaping

Tool Option: Full-Cost
Accounting

Tool Option: Life-Cycle
Assessment

Tool Option:
Input/Output Analysis

Tool Option: Agent-
Based Modeling

Figure 5.9 Matrix proposed by
D. Allen to evaluate various green
design techniques with respect
for science, social, and economic
metrics.

the engineer's responsibilities extend well beyond the construction, operation,
and maintenance stages. Such an approach has been articulated by the American
Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). The integrated matrix helps DFE to
be visualized, as recommended by the ASME 9 (see Table 5.1). This allows for
the engineer to see the technical and ethical considerations associated with each
component of the design as well as the relationships among these components.
For example, health risks, social expectations, environmental impacts and other
societal risks and benefits associated with a device, structure, product, or activity
can be visualized at various stages of the manufacturing, marketing, and appli-
cation stages. This yields a number of two-dimensional matrices (see Fig. 5.8)
for each relevant design component. And each respective cell indicates both the
importance of that component and the confidence (expressed as scientific cer-
tainty) that the engineer can have about the underlying information used to assess
the importance (see the Figure 1.5 legend). Thus, the matrix is a visualization of
the life cycle, or at least substantial portion of it.
The matrix approach is qualitative or at best semiquantitative, but like multiple-
objective plots, provides a benchmark for comparing alternatives that would oth-
erwise be incomparable. To some extent, even numerical values can be assigned to
each cell to compare them quantitatively, but the results are at the discretion of the
analyst, who determines how different areas are weighted. The matrix approach