The Evolution of Design Process - Sustainable Design: The Science of Sustainability and Green Engineering - page 21

Figure 1.7 Safety and
environmental risks associated
with primary and secondary
costs. Increased safety and
sustainability can be gained by
considering secondary costs in
product and system design. This
is the beginning of the life-cycle
perspective, especially when
costs and impacts are considered
in addition to financial measures.
Adapted from M. Martin and
R. Schinzinger, Ethics in Engineering,
McGraw-Hill, New York, 1996.

Total Cost

Secondary Costs

Primary Costs

Minimum Total Costs

Increasing risk (decreasing safety)

Design software is becoming increasingly robust. We can now store parametric
data that allow comparisons of various options across multiple dimensions. Design
teams can rapidly develop prototype alternatives early in the process and continue
to test development as solutions emerge and take form. And as we gather more
data and test these models, our uncertainties will continue to decrease. Of course,
we will never be completely certain about outcomes, in light of the myriad
influences and variables. However, the integrated approach is much better than
the brute force of a single design strategy, in which we can only hope that
there will be no unpleasant surprises down the road (e.g., material and system
incompatibilities, unexpected operational costs, change orders, retrofits).
Continuous improvement calls for sound science (see Fig. 1.8). New dimen-
sions against which design alternatives will be able to be measured include the
evaluation of technical inputs being proposed, as well as modeling performance
against multiple variables such as climatic conditions. Returning to our living
organism analogy, a design needs technical expertise to grow; thus such infor-
mation is the design's “nutrients.” Such technical nutrients cycle through the
design process. For example, a more complete picture of energy consumption is
gained by models able to look both upstream to manufacturing and transport to
account for embodied energy, as well as downstream to test the digital prototype
against a range of environmental conditions, not simply a static condition derived
from the averages for a particular site. Consideration can also be given to the
potential for regenerative design by accounting for and analysis of the technical
and biological nutrients that a proposed design will consume and how easily
these nutrients are able to find productive reuse in the next generation or cycle
of use.