First Principles - Sustainable Design: The Science of Sustainability and Green Engineering - page 78

that their measures of success at the university stress operation and maintenance.
In fact, the quadrants must all have feedback loops to one another.
This view can also apply to symbiotic relationships among institutions. Duke
University is located at one of the points of the Research Triangle in North
Carolina. The other two points are the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
and North Carolina State University. All three schools have engineering programs,
but their emphasis differs somewhat. Duke is recognized as a world leader in
basic research, but its engineering school tends to place a greater emphasis on
application of these sciences. For example, there is much collaboration between
Duke's School of Medicine and the biomedical engineering program in Duke's
Pratt School of Engineering. The University of North Carolina also has a world-
renown medical school, but its engineering program is housed in the School of
Public Health. So this engineering research tends to advance health by addressing
environmental problems. North Carolina State is the first place that the state
of North Carolina looks for designers, so engineers graduating from NC State
are ready to design as soon as they receive their diplomas. However, NC State
also has an excellent engineering research program that applies the basic sciences
to solve societal problems. All of this occurs within the scientific community
of the Research Triangle, exemplified by Research Triangle Park (RTP), which
includes centers supported by private and public entities that have a particular
interest in mind. In this way, the RTP researchers are looking for new products
and better processes. The RTP can be visualized as the “Edison” of the Triangle,
although research in the other two quadrants is ongoing in the RTP labs. This
can be visualized in an admittedly oversimplified way, as in Figure 2.14.
In the seemingly elegant model, the degree to which a given body of research
seeks to expand understanding is represented on the vertical access, and the degree

Figure 2.14 Simple
differentiation of the knowledge
and utility drivers in the
design-related research ongoing
at institutions at Research
Triangle Park, North Carolina.

Consideration of use?
Less

More

Public Health
Engineering at
University of
North Carolina -
Use-inspired
basic research

Engineering
Science at Duke
University-
Pure basic
research

More

Quest for
fundamental
understanding?

Research Triangle
Park Institutes-
Need driven
research

Engineering at
North Carolina
State University-
Pure applied
research

Less