Greetings everyone. Today's presentation is on the topic of Sustainable Design. I believe that design has three primary goals. Beauty, utility and sustainability. And today we focus on the third one which is Sustainable Design. But let's step back a little and look at this notion of sustainable development. What exactly does that mean? And here's a definition from the Bruntland Report from 1987. Essentially, this defines sustainable development, as the kind of development that does meet the needs of people now, people in the present, this generation. But, without compromising the needs of future generations. We should use our resources in such way that we are able to satisfy our needs now. But, ensuring the fact that five, six, seven, eight, ten generations down the line, that group of people is also able to meet their needs through the resources that they need. And, that essentially is sustainable development. John Elkington has come up with this notion of the triple bottom line. What does that mean? Essentially, very often when companies come up with new innovations, new ides, new plans for growth they think of the bottom line and that essentially means, financial profit, economics. Can we make money through this new growth, new innovation, new development, etcetera? What Elkington is suggesting is that very often that comes at the cost of two other things. Which is social needs, people, and the planet. So what he suggests we do when we think of any new development is we think of the triple bottom line. Not just profit, but also people, and also planet. So he's defined to the bottom line as something that looks at the financial, social and environmental performance of the corporation over a period of time. Not just today or tomorrow, but over a period of time. So TBL, or the triple bottom line, essentially is thinking of environmental responsibility, social equity and economic viability before embarking on any sort of a new innovation or design project. One really significant way of thinking about the impact on the planet of environmental impact is by thinking of the entire life cycle of the things that we reproduce. Not just the time that is bought, sold, used but from the very initial moment when the raw materials for that thing dug out of the earth to the time that its thrown back into the earth. That is life cycle thinking, thinking of the complete life of the product. And for this presentation we'll focus on products on physical devices things that we used, rather than buildings or indigenous basis or graphics. These product key of good tangible sense of how to think of the notion of sustainable design in this presentation. So, life cycle thinking has five key components, it thinks of raw materials, manufacturing, lifetime use, transportation and finally the end-of-life. And let's look each of these in a little bit of more detail. If you think of products, like a cell phone for example, what is often thought about by designers is one slice of time. The lifetime use. Can I design it for the person that is going to use this device over its lifetime and that could be 6 months, 9 months, 10 months, 1 year. However, it's very important for us to think a little bit longer. Would you think of the raw materials of which the devices are made, would you think of how they manufactured, would you think of mode of transportation that happens over the life of this product and finally what happens at the end-of-life. What you see here is a very linear process, right? From raw materials to end-of-life. I think what's very critical to think about is, another way of thinking about is, most cyclical and let's look at that in just a second. If you think of a building, instead of a product, how is the building imagined? But there's the operation was the building is errected, how is it use? But just like the product, it also has some other components to it. One is the design,how is it created? The second, is its construction. Further down the road, it's maintenance and what happens to it when it's demolished, it's end-of-life as well. So in both cases, for the product, for the cellphone and for, in this case, the building, you see that this is a linear process, a straight line. I think what's more critical for us to think about, and this becomes a part of sustainable design and development, is to think of these very same components in a cyclical format. So it's not just that it starts here and ends there, but can we think of them as a cycle? Can we say that at the end-of-life, what is left behind ends up becoming the raw materials? If we do that we have some sort of a closed loop. And these closed loop systems tend to be a lot less wasteful, lot less polluting, lot less problematic than these linear open-ended systems. So can we think of the same thing for the building? Can we think of three phases? The pre-building phase, which includes things like extraction of the materials, processing of the materials, creating the bricks, manufacturing, transportation. The building phase itself, when you have construction, operation and maintenance. And finally, the post-building phase, where it's waste management, recycling, and reuse. This becomes a lot better as a system, as a mechanism, as a structure, rather than erect and demolish, right? This becomes a lot more, life cycle base we are thinking about the building and lot most sustainable as well. So, what we see in this slide is with 3 scenarios. We have the current situation on the top left, we have one solution on the bottom left and the third solution on the right. What's happening on the current situation in terms of development? We have resources, which you see in the form of the icon of a battery. Resources are depleting over time. Products, the number of products we create are increasing over time because there is more population and therefore the amount of pollution is increasing over time. The amount of waste is increasing over time. So this is a current model. We have resources are depleting, we have increased population therefore more products and more production also means more waste. This needs to change because this is unsustainable. One of the solutions that you see on the bottom left is solution one which is referred to as the three R's. Which is reduce, reuse, recycle. So can we reduce the amount of resources we use? Yes that's possible. Can we reduce some of the products we make? It's possible. And can we reduce some of the waste, can we then convert of that waste back into resources, into raw materials, and reuse some of that waste to create a more sustainable planet? This is definitely one solution, but this is a solution which is being less bad. We are not completely being good, we're being less bad. We're losing less resources, less products, and less waste. Another model, which you see on the right, which is refered to as C2C. This is called Cradle to Cradle, this was developed by McDonough and Braungart. What they say is, in terms of resources, let's use renewable resources, like solar energy, like wind energy, etc. These are renewable. We're not depleting the Earth of things like fossil fuels that cannot be replenished as quickly, but we are using renewable resources. We do need more products over time. That is bound to be, but. We are reducing waste. So what this suggests in terms of thinking of cradel to cradle is that we have a technical cycle and a biological cycle, right? And what should happen is we think of the technical cycle also as a biological cycle. So if we have biodegradable materials. If you have things that can be reused as raw materials. We are creating a system by which we are going from cradle to cradle. Nothing is actually wasted. It is all being reused back as a part of the system. This is called cradle to cradle. And it's a, a lot more sustainable solution in terms of. Moving forward with design, but let's look at those five things that we talked about with life cycle assessment or life cycle thinking. Raw materials. One of the design strategies is to use low impact material. Things that have less impact on the planet. Things that have less impact on the environment. Things that have less embodied energy in them. That's one thing we can do. You can also use non-polluting materials. So for example, instead of plastics that will stay in the landfill forever can we use biodegradable materials that will disappear and leave no trace behind? One strategy often used by designers is not to mix materials. So if you have a product that uses five different materials, it's a lot harder to recycle than if you have a product that uses only one material. It is a lot more difficult to have multiple materials. But if you do have multiple materials, design it so that it can be disassembled. So if you have a product that is a plastic casing, metal components inside and something else happening inside as well, is it designed so that it can be quickly taken apart? So, recycle the plastic over here. You recycle the steel over here. You recycle the copper over there, that makes it a lot easier and a lot more sustainable. Use long lasting materials. So in cases where you need to have a durable product that lasts a long time, that doesn't end up in a landfill. How about using materials that actually age well? Using metals, using glass, those kinds of things become a lot appropriate in this situations. And one finally thing is to use local materials. Can we use materials that don't have to transported over long distance, but can be found locally, thereby, minimizing transportation, minimizing cost, and therefore, minimizing pollution as well? Here are some examples. These are containers that are made from biodegradable polymers. So these are things that you can actually, after you are done using them, you can throw them out into a composting unit. And over time, they will degrade and leave nothing behind. Very unlike the polymers that we use today, which are not biodegradable. Similar thing, cutlery. We can design cutlery that can be made with materials that degrade over time. These are single use items like forks and knives, and spoons. In some cases, you might need to have singular item use and that's okay as long as leave impact on the environment for a long time. This is packaging. This is packaging that is based in starch. So when you're done using the packaging, these are often referred to as peanuts that are put in boxes. Once the packaging has arrived where needs to, you can either reuse this for the next time you want to ship something out or you can dissolve this in water and throw it out and it would be completely fine. It's completely harmless to the environment. There's packaging these days, the clear packaging that you see here for the salad, actually is biodegradable packaging. This is made from biopolymers that, again, do not leave a trace on the environment. However, one thing to keep in mind is that if you can avoid using single use items. If instead of using plastic forks and knives, you can use metal, this last a lot, lot longer. And therefore, potentially could have a lot less impact on the environment. Very often this question comes up in shopping. Should you use a plastic bag or should you use a paper bag? Researcher shown that if you compare the two, the impacts off the plastic bag are actually a lot less than the impact off the paper bags. There's several reasons like the paper industry is traditionally actually polluting. Paper degrades but it holds sometimes not less than the plastic bag. In transportation, you can ship a lot more plastic bags in one container than you can ship paper bags. So there are several reason why plastic is better than paper, but think of the problems of plastics. So this is an example where very often, plastic has been found inside the bodies of animals. So, some turtles have jellyfish as their food. In some situations when they see these plastic bags, they look like diaphanous jellyfish and they devour these plastic bags, creating blockages inside the animals. And therefore, killing them in the process. What is much better rather than paper or plastic is reusable bags. So if you go to the grocery store, take a bag that can be used over and over again like a cloth bag or something that can last a lot longer than a single trip to the grocery store. So, that's raw materials. I'd like to look at the next life cycle phase, manufacturing. Room temperature manufacturing is supposed to be a lot, lot better, because it cuts down on the amount of energy significantly. One other thing that can also happen in manufacturing is minimizing waste. Can we design manufacturing such that there is a lot less waste that's generated and therefore, making the process a lot more sustainable? If you're using the consumption of energy in the process is also really important, cutting down the amount of pollution. A lot of industries like the paper industry, for example is extremely polluting in terms of the water. Lots of industries need a significant amount of water in terms of cooling, in terms of transportation. Can we cut down emissions in the air? So by cutting down the pollution of air, water and soil, we might have a much better and much more sustainable manufacturing process. What you see in this case is high temperature manufacturing where the metals are molten to be poured into some sort of mold. And this, you guys as you can imagine, as you can see this photograph requires enormous amounts of heat. Generating this amount of heat means an enormous amount of energy. So one of the things that can be done is to move to things like additive manufacturing or what's often referred to as one form of 3D printing, which gives you, as you can seen in this photograph, a lot more interesting shapes. These shapes will be very difficult to manufacture with traditional manufacturing techniques. And so, things like 3D printing, what you see here are 3D printers, they do additive manufacturing. They build a product or a thing layer by layer. There's a nozzle, there's some kind of a polymer, some kind of a plastic that slowly builds a product layer by layer and this happens at room temperature. So you do not need the kinds of massive energy consuming systems, but so this form of 3D printing or additive manufacturing could be something that we could use in the future as a form of sustainable manufacturing. Let's look at the third phase, Lifetime Use. What happens to the product during its lifetime when people are actually using it? One design strategy is to make sure that things are not used and tossed out, but they're used over a long time. So, can we design durable products? Can we design things that we don't toss after a few days, creating waste, but something that lasts a long time? Can we reduce energy consumption? One of the things that's happening these days in terms of the design of washing machines for clothes washing is cutting down the amount of water they use and cutting down the amount of energy they use. That makes products a lot more sustainable. Can we reduce the amount of waste that's generated? Can we cut down the amount of things that are tossed out into the landfill, into the trash? That would be one really important thing of after assessing a design. So, what you see here is a chair designed by a designer Phillip Stark. It's called the Hudson chair. This is made from aluminum. It's one material only that's used in this chair and what it does is if you have to recycle this chair, it becomes a lot easier. It also is a product that lasts an extremely long amount of time. It's a durable product. It's designed from one material. And in term of lifetime use, it extends the life of the product making it a lot more sustainable. What else can we do in terms of sustainability? What else can we think of? If we want to use better sources of energy, there's things like wind energy. This becomes a renewable form of energy, does not rely on fossil fuels. And if we start shifting Our energy systems too, such forms such as renewable energy, like wind, or like solar. Is a product, is a lights designed from using solar energy, we start moving towards a lot more reduced impact during the lifetime of the device itself. Next up is transportation, the fourth aspect of lifecycle thinking. We live in a global economy. We live in an environment where things are designed in one place, manufactured in another place, and sold in a third place. This happens constantly, this is a global economy in which we live. However, what that means is that things are transported over wide distances, and that means that's there pollution in the process. Shipping containers, ships, planes, trains, cars, are constantly shipping goods from one place to another, and in that process they're creating pollution. If we are able to minimize transportation, we can cut down impacts and therefore make the system a lot more sustainable. One thing we can do if we have to transport things is use forms of transport that are a lot less harmful, that are a lot less polluting. For example, shipping something by planes, sending them over air, is probably the most polluting form of transportation. Perhaps you can cut that down and use other forms of transportation that make it a lot safer for the environment. One other thing that we can do is how about using only local material and local conditions? In that case, we don't have to go out long distances to find the material that we need, we use local materials. This happens quite commonly in architecture where architects will use only the materials, only the clay or the stone or the wood that is found in that specific location, thereby cutting down the amount of transportation that happens in building that structure. What this mean is that you have to setup local supply chains. Can you reach out manufacturers that are local? Can you reach out to raw materials supplies that are local? Can you reach out to people who can maintain the product locally? This becomes a good way of minimizing the amount of transportation. And therefore making the system allot more sustainable. What you see here, this is a very typical form of transportation of goods. These large shipping containers, large tanks come from all over the world transporting goods, supplies, and materials all over the world, again creating enormous amount of water and air pollution in the process. And the final stage of life cycle, thinking life cycle assessment is what's call end of life. What happens to the product after you're done using it? Does it get dust out, does it get thrown into the land fill, is it recycle, is it re-use in some way? The more we think of the end of life, the more systemic the systems we can create. One thing is can we extend the life of the product, so that when it does end it happens over a long period of time? Can we design chairs that will last people a lifetime? Can we design cars that will last 30, 40, 50 years? So designing for durability is one really important strategy that sustainable design participates in. But if you do something that does has to die, it does has to end its life, can it be recyclable? Can we design so that all the components, everything that that product was made of doesn't get tossed out, but ends up back into the system in some form, in some fashion? To do that, we'd have to design for disassembly. If a product contains 15 different components, and therefore 25 different materials, every design so that the screws that come up apart, the snap fits that come apart, it's easy to disassemble the product. And therefore, it's easy to recycle as well. If you have a situation of mixed materials, it is not possible to recycle the product. There are certain situations where certain fins have metal fin on one side and plastic on the other side. There are certain cans that have metal on the outside and plastic on the inside. Those are inseparable and therefore non-recyclable. So one way to keep in one, you need to keep in mind in terms of end of life is, if it's a single material, or if it's a material that can be separated, we can recycle it and therefore cut down the process of going to the landfill. This is what typically a landfill could look like. We have a whole range of different kinds of materials. You see tires, you see metal, you see plastic, you see glass. All of that is a part of this landfill. If we have means of separating this, if you have means of making sure that we are able to extract some of these things from here, we can cut down the process of moving things to the landfill, therefore cut down the waste, therefore cut down pollution, and therefore make things a lot more sustainable. So in terms of reducing, if reduce, repair, recycle is the way to go, which often is considered a good way to be more sustainable, let's cut down on things like these. These are single use batteries. Batteries include lots of toxic chemicals. Reducing the number of batteries we use can be really good way of making the world a much more sustainable place. Recycle. If printers, scanners, copiers, etc., end their life, can we find ways that you can separate them, recycle them, reuse them for something else? Let's find means of repair. The car industry have done a very good job of making sure that cars are repairable, their lives can be extended. They that does not happen to electronic products. Electronic product gets thrown out, simply because it's difficult to repair them. But can we design for repair? Can we make sure that things can be opened up? Things can be swapped out, things can be changed, parts can be removed, to make sure that we can extend the lives of these goods simply by making sure that they can be repaired. So what we can do in terms of thinking of sustainable design is to look at all aspects of the device. What raw materials is it made out of, how is it manufactured, how is it used during its lifetime, how is it transported, and what happens when it dies? And if we think of these five phases of the product and if you think about it carefully, if you think of reducing impacts, we can make the world a lot more sustainable. So these are some of the environmental issues we've talked about, in addition to the environmental issues, remember sustainability first to people, profit, and planet. If you think of the social issues, what are some of the social issues? Human health, we should design products that do not impact human health in a bad way. We think of health of humans, but also entire societies. We should also make sure there is access, access to opportunity. Very often, people who work in factories that make the products that we use today work on assembly lines. They don't have means of progressing. They don't have means of improving their learning. They don't have room for development. Can we design, can we create a system by which we give people access to opportunity? We allow people and encourage people to improve their lives as they work longer and longer. And to think about what's the labor conditions. What kinds of conditions are seen in factories, how can we improve those conditions and what can we do to make sure that people who make our products has just as good of a life as people who use the products that we make? So factories typically have environments that are complex, have a lot going on. They have assembly lines. They have moving conveyor belts and these are difficult environments in which to work. Way off from the worker's monotonous, it's better to. And it's very important for us to think about creating conditions in which workers can pride. That if they can take pride in the work that they do, and we as consumers can also take pride in the fact that is made in conditions where people actually enjoyed working in these factories enjoyed doing the work that they do. So what we've talked about today, is thinking about sustainable design. Thinking about not only the product at one point in time, but the product at the through the entire lifecycle, from the materials in which it was made, raw materials, through how it is manufactured, through the amount of energy it is uses during it's lifetime and long it lasts. To how long, how far, it is transported from and what happens when it ends of it's life. If it designed to think of all the aspects of the product, we can cut down in tacks. We can cut down resources. We can manage these things a lot better. And make the world a lot of sustainable. Thank you.
