Design and Life Cycle Assessment – eLCAd' 22 Recap
Consideration of Cradle to Grave environmental impacts plays an increasingly important role in product design and development across the industrial spectrum. This aspect of architecture and design was the focus of Environmental Life Cycle Assessment in Design 2022 (eLCAd 2022), a three-day international symposium, held virtually from March 29 to March 31, 2022. The annual symposium was organized by the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment (ACLCA), with support from the Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche en opérationnalisation du développement durable (CIRODD). The event brought together designers, the LCA community, researchers, and data experts to further the integration of sustainability strategies based upon the environmental LCA into design decision-making. The program of the symposium was organized in several tracks, including: Design and LCA: More than Just Numbers to Make Decisions, Market Forces Driving Sustainable Design Decisions, UI/UX for LCA Data Integration, Computation in LCA and Design Part 1 - Challenges to full automation, and Computation in LCA and Design Part 2 - LCA and GPU driven solutions.
Design and LCA: More than Just Numbers to Make Decisions
The leaps in quantitative and analytical computational power help generate multiple formal design iterations and provide insight into any number of material performance parameters that can improve sustainable design processes at multiple scales. Reza Tabatabai, Sr. Technical Manager for Simulation Portfolios at Dassault Systems, stated in his presentation: “80% of a product’s environmental impact is determined during the design phase.” For this reason, Tabatabai argues that “… sustainability assessment as a process must start early and be continuous. Decision-making during initial design is cheaper and easier.” In conclusion of his presentation Tabatabai had the following advice for design engineers: “Perform efficient Life Cycle Assessment studies and elect best design alternatives, respecting assigned goals to deliver innovative products.”
Commerce: Market Forces Driving Sustainable Design Decisions
During the design process, priorities are given to aesthetics, cost, safety, time-to-market, and other non-environmental impact considerations. Incorporating the environmental LCA as a factor in design process will not only deliver improvements over time from the sustainability perspective, but will add value to the perception of stakeholders. Caroline de Baëre, Adjunct Professor of Footwear Design at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, shared her vision of the future of design at the symposium. “Designers and brands of the future will rely on 3D as an additional and important sustainable option,” she said. The use of 3D technology in design leads to fewer materials sourced, prototype corrections are eliminated, more resources will become available. In Baere’s view sustainability and design are naturally linked.
Dashboards and UI/UX for LCA Data integration
The effective user-centric design principles embedded directly in design software tools optimize the designer’s own ability to quickly recognize superior alternatives with materially lower environmental impacts. To Roderick Bates, Head of Integrated Practice at Enscape, “it’s not just about the software user, it’s also about the data consumer. And we're finding that people don't want to have just a render of what the product might look like from a physical sense, but they want to start using our models by which you can access the source information. If you want to find out the impact of a wall looking through a spreadsheet is one way to do it, but it's a lot easier if you just walk up to a wall, touch it, and see what color it turns into. If it's blue, well, you're probably fine. If it's red, you might want to investigate. From our (Enscape) perspective it's about creating a really simplified way of understanding information that can be legible to anyone and then allow for a deeper dive and greater explanation. Exploration into the more nuanced datasets,” Bates said.
Computation in LCA and Design (Part 1 - Challenges to full automation)
What are the barriers to the free flow of data and ways to overcome them in a design context? Sangwon Suh from the University of California at Santa Barbara, pointed to the problem of data categorization and used computer vision as an example. He noted that we (humans) can distinguish ducks from shoes by looking at the picture, but for a computer the picture is just a collection of pixels with different colors, and it doesn't really understand what it represents. Not until we teach them what those images and shapes represent. “This is about artificial intelligence, machine learning,” Suh said. “It requires massive amount of tagging, which is a manual procedure, and this hasn't really gone into that level of precision for our field. But it is coming, and it should come so that the characterization is done. As accurate or even more accurate than what we can provide, the machines will be able to do that for us.”
Computation in LCA and Design (Part 2 - LCA and GPU driven solutions)
Advanced computational solutions are increasingly used in both the AEC and entertainment industries. Increasing collaboration between previously discrete sectors is constructing new beneficial possibilities in the Metaverse. Neil D’Souza, CEO at Makersite, shared his dream for the future: “Imagine the world's largest, fully transparent, live supply chain database. Overlaid with multiple business criteria (cost, compliance, risk, eco, health), and an AI engine to connect it accurately with company data. That's what we call a digital twin. We're trying to connect a product to its supply chain. Think of the entire supply chain, companies all around the world. And what we're doing is connecting the company's product to all its supply chains through the definition of this product.” Society benefits, according to D’Souza, by first acknowledging that “100% of environmental impacts come from products” and only by changing these products and their supply chains, can we reduce these impacts. “33% of GDP is generated from new products each year.” By targeting each one of these new products, we can accelerate our transition into a green economy.
eLCAd 2023
In his closing remarks, John Cays, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Hillier College and the Symposium organizer, gave a hint of what to expect at eLCAd 2023. “Next year we’ll move more into the social implications of all this work that's being done. The ACLCA community has not really had a large voice in this conversation, so far. In the end, we are talking about people, as well as the planet, as well as profit. So, this kind of triple-bottom-line approach – with an eye to support and enhance the physical and social wellbeing in the biosphere - I think could be very helpful as we go forward.”