The objective of this grant is to conduct a workshop that will bring together experts to address fundamental researchs issues in sustainability in engineering design. These experts will include: researchers in design theory and methodology; researchers in sustainability; and practitioners in sustainable design. This workshop will focus on the theory of engineering design that addresses issues of sustainability, as well as the methods and tools to facilitate sustainability. The goal of this workshop is to identify a research agenda to facilitate the formulation of a theoretical basis for the sustainable design. The deliverables for this workshop include a summary report of findings, publication of workshop recommendations in leading design journals, and briefings to the sponsors.
If successful, this workshop will lead to a rigorous normative theory underlying the design of products for sustainability. Design for Sustainability addresses issues from decrease of waste in the process to design for dissassembly for optimal reuse, recycling or remanufacturing. The potential impact across a broad spectrum of products and industries is substantial and critical.
Workshop on Design Methods for Sustainability Deborah Thurston and Harrison Kim University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign What we did: This project was a workshop on Design Methods for Sustainability held on August 15, 2010, in conjunction with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Design Technical Conference in Montreal, Canada. Acceptance to the workshop was on the basis of a short essay application, resulting in a total of 37 attendees. Attendees came prepared for the meeting by reading a set of background materials in order to establish a common ground. Two invited speakers provided industrial and academic overviews. Six working groups developed responses to a set of questions posed by the organizers, and reported back to the group as a whole. A summary of workshop results was also presented to the ASME Design for Manufacturing and the Lifecycle Conference as an invited plenary talk on August 17. Why is it important: The intellectual merit of this project is that it provides a new template for interdisciplinary research in "design for sustainability", which is especially difficult because it redefines the traditional scope of engineering design analysis. The "Design for Sustainability" community has evolved from a short term, special interest group to one which has grown in importance and breadth. Sustainability must be considered in the design process, but we lack tools to do it well. There are many different venues in which design for sustainability researchers operate and present their work, and progress has been made on many fronts. At this workshop, researchers across a range of communities established a common understanding of the current status of this rapidly evolving field, defined the limits of the current state of the art, and developed an agenda for future research. What are the impacts: A broad impact of this workshop has been to identify key areas of need in Design for Sustainability. This helps set the agenda for research, and helps avoid resources of time and money being spent on problems that are either already solved, or are not important. Other broader impacts include firmer connections between researchers in different disciplines working on the same types of problems, but from different points of view.
