Video Reflection

Greenfly

Greenfly is a new useful online tool for designers. It allows designers to access environmental consideration, life cycle assessment data and eco design strategy, to help to improve green products.

1.     To design a good eco friendly product, we need to consider about its manufacture (materials and processes), transport, use, end of life, water use, energy demand, solid waste etc.

2.     These considerations are not independent, they are linked to each other, such as material and end of use.

3.     Durable looks will not make design to be success but how it helps environment.

Autodesk: whole systems and lifecycle thinking

This video defines two important principles of sustainable design: whole system thinking and life-cycle thinking.

Whole system thinking is a way of thinking a product connects social, environmental, and technical systems. Lifecycle thinking is a way of thinking environmental impacts that involves at each stage. There are five steps to solve design problem: define problem, prioritize objectives, brainstorm solutions, and use metric, repeat use metric.

1.     Consideration of impacts through the entire lifecycle helps to optimize for environment performance.

2.     Factor 10 engineering principles are useful for design and we should learn design with brainstorming.

3.     Focus the most important problem of you product, the biggest of your product, find it out and solve it.

Autodesk: improving product lifetime

Extending product useful life to maximize its lifetime and to reduce manufacturing impact. To do this, designers can make it hard to break, make it repairable or can be upgraded, design it is recyclable, or design durable components instead of whole product. Design strategies for improving product lifetime are: considerations of materials, connections, architecture and information (interface).

1.     Consider product’s intended use.

2.     Extending a product’s useful life is often a good sustainability strategy.

3.     Not all products should have a long lifetime, make sustainable end of life instead of extend lifetime for those products.

Autodesk: lightweighting

Light weight is a way to design sustainable product. Products made with less material have less negative impact, such as saving finite natural resources, saving embodied energy. However lightweight is not always suitable for every product, because lightweight may compromise products’ robustness. To do this we should consider about materials or wastes are big parts of product’s impact, does your product moves.

1.     Whole systems thinking may help us to identify.

2.     Lightweight not the same with material reducing.

3.     Lightweight may cost higher cost, we should consider about it.

Autodesk: green materials selection

A good material is abundant, non-toxic, minimal resources, physical properties, meets regulations, good end of life options and affordable.

1.     Use good materials data is critical for making decision.

2.     A good material also has good life cycle impacts to whole systems

3.     For different types of product such as food container, designers should not only think about material environment impacts but also health impacts.

Autodesk: energy efficient design

There are different forms of energy, but energy is neither created nor destroyed, we gain energy from energy converting. Not both energy are effective and has low environment impacts. To find how efficient the whole system is, we can multiply the efficiencies of each stage.

1.     Make efficiency improvements by minimizing common forms of energy loss.

2.     Being energy effective means both designing for efficiency and choosing the right technologies and energy sources.

3.     Avoid using energy sources that may release greenhouse gases such as coal, oil etc.