Greenfly: Design greener products
Greenfly
is an online program which offers “cutting edge assistance in integrating
sustainability into your designs.” Essentially the program offers a template
which a user is to fill in with various pieces of information regarding the
design. Factors such as material usage, weight and current market costing each
weigh in to generate a computorised report to communicate to clients the
environmental impact of your product.
Autodesk: Whole system and life cycle
thinking
1.
Define the problem by looking at the whole system
2. Prioritize objectives by
assessing life-cycle impacts (life cycle assessment)
3. Brainstorm
solutions by looking at the whole system
4. Use
metrics to evaluate and choose solutions
5. Repeat
(every time you innovate)
Autodesk: Improving product lifetime
Designers
can minimise waste by extending the product life time eg. Double the lifetime
of a phone to cut down waste by half
The basic
product life cycle is as follows:
Resources
> raw materials > manufacturing > use > landfill
To
maximize product lifetime (extending the use phase) a designer can make the
product more durable and easier to repair or upgrade, or recycle and
remanufacture to skip through the resource acquisition phase. The ideal product
life cycle is close-looped, as in it does not require virgin materials or
contribute to landfill. However it is important to remember that not everything
should be designed to last forever: a product’s lifetime should be designed to
be appropriate for the product.
Autodesk: Lightweighting
Lightweight
can also be called material reduction. Every pound of material you save in a
product saves much more upstream eg. STEEL: 1lb virgin material creates 7lb
waste. Strategies to lightweight your product include hollowing out specific parts,
decreasing wall thicknesses, reinforcements like posts and ribs, and using trusses.
These strategies should be used if waste is a big part of your products impact
or if your product is powered by an energy source/moves. You can also achieve
results similar to lightweighting by sharing product among many people,
extending lifetime, using recycled components and replacing physical objects
with digital information.
Autodesk: Green materials selection
The
ideal green material is abundant, non toxic, requires minimal resources to
manufacture/use, has the correct physical properties for its use, meets or
exceeds regulations, offers positive end-of-life options and is affordable.
Autodesk: Energy efficient design
Over
the years we’ve become experts at manipulating and harnessing energy to create
means of transport, keeping our food products at manageable temperatures, and
others. Energy cannot be lost or destroyed, it simply changes transitions,
including when it’s converted to unwanted stages such as heat, noise and
vibration. While a lot of energy may leave from one point, much of it escapes
and in the end we often only receive a very small portion of said energy to
power our appliances.
