CAREER: Multidisciplinary and Life Cycle Holistic Sustainable Design

This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant investigates a new way to address sustainability in product design. By designing products with multiple perspectives and a longer time horizon in mind, companies can be more profitable, consumers can get better products, and environmental and social wellbeing will improve. Current sustainable design methods focus on individual phases of the product life cycle (e.g., production, use, disposal), decisions of particular stakeholders (e.g., manufacturers, consumers, policy makers), or specific sustainability metrics (e.g., carbon footprint, water consumption, particulate emissions).

This project goes beyond these focused methods by developing a holistic approach to sustainable design that accounts for all life cycle phases, stakeholders, and sustainability outcomes, using tools and techniques from the systems engineering and engineering design research communities. This holistic approach is expected to lead to more comprehensive and ubiquitous sustainable design practices, as well as business strategies and policies that influence long-term environmental, social, and economic sustainability from a systems perspective.

Additionally, by enhancing the quality and availability of related educational materials at various levels, and by better understanding how people think about sustainability, the pipeline of students and professionals will be better prepared to address complex sustainability challenges.

The objective of this research is to enable simultaneous consideration of a product’s relevant life cycle stages, sustainability metrics, stakeholder needs, and subsystem analyses in Design for Sustainability (DfS) by leveraging systems modeling and coordination techniques from the Design for Market Systems (DMS) and Concurrent Engineering (CE) fields. The research approach will: (1) assess coordination and modeling strategies from CE and DMS to connect sustainability-related design parameters and stakeholder decision-making across the product life cycle; (2) investigate the application of CE approaches to measure coupling strength across these decision parameters, life cycle phases, metrics, and models; and (3) survey practitioners to elicit and validate real-world sustainable design needs.

This will lead to a new holistic approach that facilitates the design of more sustainable and successful products and systems. To improve knowledge transfer and accessibility of sustainable design concepts with a broad audience of students and professionals, this project includes three interconnected education and outreach activities: (1) raise awareness of sustainable design and systems thinking among pre-college students through a new GK-12 partnership program; (2) disseminate and iteratively update the Holistic Sustainable Design approach through a project-based graduate course; and (3) assess sustainable design thinking across diverse groups of individuals.

These education and outreach activities will lead to new validated techniques for teaching sustainable design at various levels, student-generated case studies to support the research framework, and a foundational understanding of how people approach sustainability-related decisions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.