Design Project 1
The Good, the Bad, and Something New
For this project, you’ll create teams of three to look at two products in a similar category through a sustainability lens and compare their impact. To do this, you will need to understand the technical eco-system in which your products exist, analyze their inputs and outputs, and find opportunities for designing a better solution. Armed with these insights, you will recommend one over the other and sumbit designs for a new and more sustainable alternative.
dp1-GoodBadNew
Relevant Texts: Using Life Cycle Assessment Tools
Okala Design Guide (partial version)
Results
Design Project 2
Desire and Sacrifice
A small change in individual behavior can result in a massive positive (or negative) environmental impact when extended to a large population. Our second class design project, DP2, is inspired by an article in this months Delta Airlines in-flight magazine Sky, called the Power of One.
Your team is to choose one of the scenarios described below and design a solution that would accomplish the goal envisioned. How might you make a sacrifice acceptable, or put a better way, create something desirable that makes positive change happen in a large group of people? Your solution could be a new product, service, process, environment, or some combination of these approaches. Set yourself up as a start-up company, in an established company, or in a government agency.
dp2-desire-and-sacrifice
Results
Design Project 3
What’s Your Personal Sustainability Project (PSP)
The scale of the environmental problems facing the world today can cause personal paralysis. However, as a classic proverb goes, “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Personal passion, involvment and inspiration plays a key role in projects of any scale in this realm. For your PSP, and also one of your three design projects in this class, we ask: What repeated action or activity taken throughout the ten weeks of this academic quarter can you do that will make a difference in the world of sustainability?
dp3-PSP
Results
Blog
Curiosity will be important for this course. To build this skill, you will create a place to record, store, and sort your insights – a field book. Biologists use field books to record species, scientific names, and most significantly, lessons learned. This helps evolve their thinking. We will be using our field books for the same purpose. To compliment the field book, you will post to the ME222 blog. Through posts, you might share thoughts, discoveries, user insights, rants, or points of view about some dimension of sustain-ability. By doing so, we provide thought leadership and move the domain of thought forward.
Archive
Projects for 2007
May 1, 2009 at 8:43 pm |
DP2 Observation:
Our project is going to be about the “kill two birds with one stone” story, about how eliminating one 20-mile trip per week results in an absolutely fantastic decrease in environmental damage. Our thinking, though, is that it might be easier for each consumer to shave off twenty miles from their driving total per week, as opposed to eliminating one huge (and probably useful) trip.
For the past few mornings, I’ve gone on runs near Campus drive and Palm drive, and I’ve noticed two discouraging driving habits: the first, that many of the cars driving to and from campus each day are single-occupant vehicles (versus, say, car-pools), and second, that drivers perform sudden, hard stops and harsh accelerations (i.e., before and after red lights) that waste copious amounts of gasoline (as mentioned in the article we read about hypermilers).
So, as regards my DP2: yes, I’ve seen people engaged in precisely the sort of behavior that is supposed to be very environmentally detrimental. Even here, at a conscientious place like Stanford.
Now, how to get them to change?
May 2, 2009 at 11:41 pm |
A hah, new observation. So, this morning during my brunch–while I was trying to use only one napkin, as per my DP3 regulations–I happened to make an extraordinary mess of myself eating grapefruit, and so I was about to sadly grab a second napkin when I thought to ask to borrow a friend’s napkin, after she’d finished eating. Having both eaten far neater than and chosen a far-less-messy breakfast, her napkin was almost new, so I had no problem tidying myself up with it.
I realized that a lot of sustainability problems can be boiled down to an issue of divisibility of resources. Take cars, for example. It’d be nice if when you only wanted to drive yourself around, you could leave the rest of the car behind, so as not to drag around unnecessary mass. Or, say that you order plastic from McMaster-Carr in EXACTLY the proper dimensions for your product, so that you can perform the minimum necessary machining operations and thus produce the minimum total amount of waste.
I’m thinking that an avenue we might pursue for our DP2 project, therefore, will be to look for items or services that people use only fractionally, and to figure out how their use or the service itself can be modified so that there is in general less “excess”. This, I hope, will translate into less waste.