NJIT Symposium Hosting Leading Practitioners in Sustainable Design
If you have ever checked a product to see if it is low emission, energy efficient or sustainably sourced, you may be looking at information that has been derived from life cycle inventory (LCI) records in any of several curated national public or proprietary databases.
On March 30 to April 1, New Jersey Institute of Technology is co-hosting a virtual symposium with the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment (ACLCA), with the specific aim of connecting two parallel systems’ thinking practices: environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) and the multiple practices in the field of design such as urban planning, architecture, interior and industrial design. The aim of the symposium is to explore areas of convergence and further integrate strategies for sustainability from environmental LCA into design decision-making.
The program consists of three half days of presentations and working sessions, with experts including Kate Simonen, founder of the Carbon Leadership Forum, working to eliminate embodied carbon in buildings and infrastructure through collective action; Heather Dylla of the Federal Highway Administration who is developing environmental product declarations (EPD) for federal infrastructure programs; and Andrew Whalley of Grimshaw and designer of Terra—the sustainability pavilion in Dubai—speaking on sustainability for the built environment panel.
These experts, along with many others, will define current and future opportunities brought about through leaps in computational power that promise to augment and improve sustainable design processes at multiple scales.
Architecture alumnae Erin Heidelberger ’20 will be moderating the panel on tools and data, with experts from the EPA, the Carbon Leadership Forum and Sphera, a global provider of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance and risk management software and data. “Regardless of the specific field of design there are similarities in design processes across scales, from a single product to a highway system. By bringing together a diverse range of designers we can all learn from each other to find best practices in integrated LCA and design workflows.”
As consumers and businesses demand products and materials that are green or sustainable, engineers, industrial product designers, interior designers, architects and urban planners are recognizing the need to improve and quantify the sustainability of their designs by measuring the environmental impact of their processes, products, buildings and infrastructure across many separate phases in their life cycles.
Environmental Life Cycle Assessment tools, such as the OneClickLCA plugin for Revit, an application used by designers when modeling with building information, facilitate data-driven, workflow integrated, sustainable design decision-making. These tools help designers measure environmental impacts of materials, manufacturing processes, designs, or organizational and operational choices from the moment a resource is extracted from the earth, through its manufacture into a product, all the way to the end of its life.
A mobile phone provides a familiar example of this life cycle. From the cost and toxicity of mining rare earth minerals, to the energy of transportation and manufacturing, to their reuse or final disposal into landfills, environmental impacts can be measured with environmental LCA.
From the perspective of her time as a student and her introduction to environmental LCA, Heidelberger noted that, “It is a very rigorous and technical process which can be intimidating to people unfamiliar with it and it may feel at odds with typical design workflows. However, there are a variety of tools available aimed at non-expert users that integrate with various 3D modeling software and guide users through the stages of an LCA study so that everyone can leverage the power of LCA.”
NJIT's College of Architecture and Design Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, John Cays, co-organizer of the symposium with Debbie Steckel, executive director of ACLCA, believes that the potential to bring current and quickly evolving LCA tools into mainstream design processes is within reach. "Successfully integrating a life cycle approach will require designers to expand their vision and vocabulary; to consider critical issues beyond the static geometric model. Emerging tools and methods provide insight to improve performance across a wide range of embodied environmental impacts through time and at scale."
For students of engineering, architecture, design, data science or business who want to learn the tools and data driven methodologies for reducing environmental impact in design processes and for sustainable business models, the symposium is free of charge, with a special student workshop being held March 30 at 2 p.m.
A more in depth review of this topic and the book that inspired the symposium, An Environmental Life Cycle Approach to Design, can be found here. Register here. Student discount code is SRATE2021.