Sustainability Workshop Blog Feed

Okala Strategy Wheel: Free for Download on the Inventor App Store

dawndanby — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:52:03 +0000

Reduce waste, design for durability, choose greener materials: many of the basics of sustainable product design are well understood, if not always well disseminated.

One of the clearest resources on the basics of sustainable design come from three designer-professors, Philip White (ASU), Louise St. Pierre (ECUAD), Steve Belletire (SUIC). As the team behind the Okala Ecodesign effort, they've been teaching sustainable design for years, and spreading knowledge through their guides and curricula. We're excited to support their latest project.

The Okala team have just launched a free version of the Okala Ecodesign Strategy Wheel. Downloadable on the Autodesk Exchange App Store, it's a terrific high-level rundown of sustainable design strategies. It's pictured here on an iPad, but you can download it right to your desktop as a PDF.

Partly inspired by this team, we've sought to dive in further on some of these strategies. For example, we introduce how to reduce material impacts by improving product lifetime, lightweighting, and choosing greener materials - and to show you how to put these into practice with digital prototyping.

Designer and educator Jer Faludi, whom you'll recognize from many of our strategy videos, wrote about Okala on Worldchanging, "I recommend the Okala guide to designers looking for an introduction to sustainability, and those who are already versed in green design but are looking for a handy desk-side reference. While many other sources go into greater depth, Okala is immediately practicable, which is something very few books on sustainable design can say for themselves."

We recently traveled to IDSA's regional conference in Chicago, where we announced the release on our App Store, and the upcoming revision to the Okala Guide. It can be ordered on Amazon.com after June 1st. And for those of you who are members of IDSA, the updated 2012 Professional Guide will be coming with your fall issue of Innovations magazine.

Tags

product lifetime, material selection, Industrial Design

Strategy Taxonomy

Materials

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Biomimicry Challenge Winner to Mimics Desert Snail’s Passive Cooling Strategy and uses Ecotect

adammenter — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:42:26 +0000

The winners have been announced for the third annual Biomimicry Student Design Challenge, organized by the Biomimicry 3.8 Institute. The top prize went to a team of architecture and business students from the Art Institute of Isfahan in Iran. Their design, the Bio-Arch, draws inspiration from the desert snail to passively cool the building.

The challenge guidelines stated that biomimicry must be used to design a solution that results in more efficient energy utilization and ultimately reduces greenhouse gas emissions, ideally in the students’ local environment.

Since the desert climate in Iran can be very harsh, the team needed to use passive design strategies to protect occupants from intense sunlight and provide both moisture and ventilation. The design does this by minimizing the surface area exposed to solar radiation with curved surfaces, shading nested levels of activity underneath the outer shell, and creating buffer zones that are tempered with natural ventilation.

The team used the Autodesk Ecotect Analysis sunpath tool to
simulate shadows at different times of the day and year.

Biomimicry is a structured process for drawing design inspiration from nature. The students had this to say of their experience of applying the process: “Biomimicry took our notion of nature to a higher level and structured our point of view. It helped us understand how to learn from nature in the path of design. We will surely look to it as a major resource of learning and designing.”

In addition to being functional, the form of the building is also beautiful. Janine Benyus, Biomimicry 3.8 Institute co-founder and design challenge judge, says “The students from Isfahan created my favorite visual. When I look at this building, I want to see it in real life—want to visit it, spend a noon, night, and early morning in it—I can almost feel its shade and cool breeze.”

For more details on the design, including the student’s final report, see the Sustainability Workshop project gallery posting.

To see abstracts from every design proposal that was submitted are available on www.biomimicrydesignchallenge.com.

Tags

biomimicry, passive heating and cooling

Strategy Taxonomy

Net Zero Strategies

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How Innovation Strategy led to the Autodesk Eco-Material Adviser

adammenter — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:07:53 +0000

Sarah Krasley, Autodesk’s sustainable manufacturing program manager, explores the difference between innovation and invention in her recent Fast Company piece “The 6 Questions That Lead To New Innovations.”

She talks about how she and her team used six questions to come up with software that would solve a problem they’d heard over and over again: that customers would like to design using sustainable materials, but they couldn’t justify the extra expense. The result was the creation of Eco Materials Adviser, which gives engineers and designers information about both cost and environmental impact.

The Eco Material Adviser (EMA) is available as part of Inventor 2012, which can be downloaded for free by students.
Learn more about how to use the Eco Material Adviser with our videos and recommended workflow guide.
Sign-up for an upcoming webinar with Granta design, the creators of the tool.
To learn more about material selection, check out this video series on the Sustainability Workshop.

Tags

Design process, innovation, Eco Materials Adviser

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A Modular System for Outdoor Tools

adammenter — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:36:56 +0000

Reducing the Environmental Impact of the Outdoor Tool Set

Project Title: Hydra Outdoor Tool Set

Designer: John Turner, Industrial Design Student, Arizona State University

Date: January 2012

Autodesk Software Used: Autodesk® Inventor® Publisher

Project Summary

John Turner had originally designed the Hydra Outdoor Tool Set for a class project, but wasn’t happy with the outcome. With sustainability in mind, he set out to do a re-design that would be lighter weight, more durable, and easier to recycle. By watching the videos on the Sustainability Workshop he learned about design for durability, recyclability, and lightweighting. He worked to reduce the number of parts and he also focused on making the coupling mechanism stronger.

To refine the design, he sketched a couple pages of thumbnails looking at forces, motion, and interaction. For example, he added an extruded "D-shaped" support rod to protect against the torsion and shearing forces the tool would experience during use. John is much happier with this final design, and looks forward to using all he learned on future design projects.

See an interview with John about the design at Core77's website.

Overview of System

Materials and Manufacturing

Download the Inventor Publisher dataset.

Tags

lightweighting, product lifetime, tools, modular

Strategy Taxonomy

Improving Product Lifetime Strategies

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Wheelchair Designs (India Inventor 2011 Competition)

adammenter — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 01:19:29 +0000

Design Teams: Chronos (Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai); PNR (Delhi Technological University, Delhi); AUTObots (M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology Bangalore)
Date: November 2011Autodesk Software Used: Autodesk Inventor, Eco-Materials Adviser, Showcase

Project Summary

The 2011 Autodesk Inventor Student Design Competition challenged students in India to design a cost effective assistive and rehabilitation device for people with any form of impairment. Autodesk also offered an additional prize to 3 teams who create the most sustainable device. Teams were judged on how well they incorporated sustainable design strategies in their final designs. The teams chosen demonstrate key learnings in sustainable design, as highlighted below.

There is no one way to design sustainably.

While all of the teams considered material use in their sustainable design analysis, it was clear that they had different philosophies on design and sustainability. The PNR team’s simple design seeks to make existing wheelchairs more useful, the AUTObots team looked to expand the functionality of the wheelchair by pulling it out into a bed, and the Chronos team delivered a highly technical solution for electric mobility.

Good designs also considered social and financial sustainability – important criteria for a country like India with a large underserved population.

Extended usefulness to improves product lifetime

Creating designs that are useful to a wide range of people, and in a wide range of circumstances, can keep products in service longer and prevent additional manufacturing.

For example, PNR’s torque assist device builds and improves on existing platforms. The design improves people’s mobility on existing chairs and is elegant in its simplicity. With simple levers and gears, the device reduces human effort by about 40%. Their single, adjustable design works on most wheelchairs and can be used by both left and right handed people.

Taking a different approach, the AUTObot’s team designed a new wheelchair to be useful in more situations than those currently on the market. By creating a convertible chair that extends to a bed, they hope to reduce the total amount of equipment needed to keep users comfortable.

Material choice should be driven by design criteria.

It is important for the design to be an affordable long-term solution for users. Therefore, material selection was driven by cost, durability, manufacturability, and reparability. The teams used steel when the parts needed to be cheap and tough, and aluminum when needed to be stiff and light. Also, all of the teams used standard components and flexible product architecture that allowed the designs to be repaired easily and cheaply.

Fits any wheel and can be used with either hand.

The chair folds out to a bed.

Tags

mechanical design, Materials, product lifetime

Strategy Taxonomy

Improving Product Lifetime Strategies

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SLR Camera with Integrated Tripod

adammenter — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:14:32 +0000

Project Title: SLR Camera with Integrated Tripod
Designer: Erin Fong, BFA in Industrial Design, California College of the Arts
Date: October 2011
Autodesk Software Used: Autodesk® Inventor® Publisher

Project Summary

When Erin Fong set out to re-design her SLR Camera design to improve the lifetime of the product, she focused on durability and recycling. Her original concept centered on an alternate way to hold the camera when taking pictures and video. In this redesign she proposes using one camera handle instead of the original two - and making that handle into an integrated tripod that can also be used with other cameras.

See the full write-up on Core77.

Rendering of tripod handle

Tripod being used with another camera

Tags

product lifetime, camera, electronics, reuse

Strategy Taxonomy

Improving Product Lifetime Strategies

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Lili Tea Infuser

adammenter — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:48:01 +0000

Project Title: Lili Tea Infuser

Designer: Marc Levinson, industrial design student, California College of the Arts, San Francisco

Date: December 2011

Software Used: Autodesk® Inventor® Fusion, Autodesk® Inventor® Publisher, Sustainable Minds

Project Summary

Industrial design student, Marc Levinson, set out to reduce the environmental impact of his simple, yet elegant, Tea Infuser using Autodesk tools and educational resources. He first learned how to improve the product lifetime and reduce material use on the Autodesk Sustainability Workshop site, then used Autodesk® Inventor® Fusion to alter his original design, and finally rendered and animated it in Inventor Publisher. The result (as calculated by Sustainable Minds): A 60% overall environmental impact reduction from reducing thermochromic enamel use by 80% and reducing stainless steel use by 30-40%. Keep on the lookout—this unique Tea Infuser, called “Lili,” might someday be available in stores. Marc’s next task it to develop a prototype he can take to market.

Video created with Autodesk Inventor Publisher.

Comparison of deep drawing vs. roll forming. A 28% impact reduction.

60% overall impact reduction. From reducing steel use by 40% & paint use by 80%

Download the Autodesk Inventor Publisher dataset.

Tags

product lifetime, LCA, kitchen, lightweighting

Strategy Taxonomy

Improving Product Lifetime Strategies

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Designer Finds Inspiration in Litter to Design a Zero Energy Lamp

adammenter — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:27:14 +0000

The folks are Core77 have featured another innovative young designer from its Design for (Your) Product Lifetime Showcase, presented by Autodesk. For the Showcase, Core77 tasked five students to redesign commonplace objects using the tools and education found at the Autodesk Sustainability Workshop.

In this third installment, we meet 21-year old designer David Markus, a BFA in Industrial Design student from the Savannah College of Art and Design. His idea was to use sustainable manufacturing practices to create a zero energy lamp.

Leveraging the “Improving Product Lifetime” design strategy videos on the Sustainability Workshop, then using Autodesk Inventor Publisher to present his designs, David created a lighting concept that uses optical fiber to channel sunlight into the interior of a building.

“This is a concept that I've had in the back of my head for a while, and it was reignited by a recent article showing used soda bottles being filled with water and installed into houses in third-world countries,” says David, “The bottles captured a significant amount of light, and I wondered if a more industrial and refined version could be designed.”

He created a lighting concept that uses fiber optics to channel sunlight into the interior of a building (riffing off of the "Liter of Light" solar bottle project). The result is kind of like a skylight whose light goes through a fixture - and that can go around corners. It's just a concept for now. It'd be interesting to build a prototype and prove whether this would work.

Visit the Core77 blog to read David’s full interview, see what he did, and view the work of the other featured designers. Then check out the Autodesk Sustainability Workshop design strategy videos to learn how you can incorporate sustainability into your next project.

Tags

energy, product lifetime, Industrial Design, lighting

Strategy Taxonomy

Energy Efficient Strategies

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Anderson Anderson classroom update: Construction nears completion as the project wins an award

adammenter — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 05:59:08 +0000

This is the second installment of updates on the construction of Anderson Anderson’s net zero energy classroom (case study, update 1). The building is almost fully assembled. The construction crew is finishing the last details at a factory in Oregon before they disassemble it into four pieces and transport it to the site in Hawaii. Principals Mark and Peter Anderson just got back from visiting the manufacturing facility. This is the report from the front-lines.

Fine-tuning the whole system

A big advantage of pre-assembling the building prior to shipping is that the team can tune its performance as a whole system. Right now they are tuning the lighting. During design their Revit modeling helped anticipate the general placement of fixtures within the classroom, and now the “full-scale modeling” of the actual construction allows for fine tuning in-place for exact fixture heights and bulb selections.

They’re also able to construct for very tight seams and joints. The typical tolerances of a manufactured building fabricated in sections aren’t always enough for a high performance building like this. For example, where some sections join, there are multiple layers of flashing that come together and need to seal tightly. The construction coordinator’s mantra in coordinating these flashing details with his team was: "If you were a drop of water, where would you go?"

This type of fine-tuning is especially important because this is the first prototype unit, and the team is developing details that would be easy to reproduce in larger quantity when more units are built in the future.

Manufacturing meets architecture

This building is a great example of where green building meets manufactured buildings. An industry that was once stereotyped by poorly built structures with high energy consumption and unhealthy indoor air quality is now stepping up as an important player in the future of green building.

Anderson Anderson had to be clever with design details to maintain the beauty and originality of a building designed to be mass produced and relocated. They’ve hidden all of the joints by strategically placing whiteboards and cork boards, extending the carpet up the walls to act as baseboard, and using nicely contrasting materials at the joints (white metal and natural wood coming together at the roof truss).

Design software aids constructability

The manufacturer, Blazer Industries, used Anderson Anderson’s Revit model during construction. As a result, there weren’t any major questions, conflicts, or delays from the building design and documentation. Blazer started by pulling production drawings and quantity takeoffs from the Revit model.

As with any building, there were some things the on-site crew had to work-out from a buildability standpoint once they procured the building materials. This is an area that Anderson Anderson sees opportunity for even tighter collaboration on future projects. Their hope is to work with the manufacturer to continue updating the “as designed” Revit model, creating an “as built” model by the project’s completion.

This type of feedback between the design and fabrication processes helps Anderson Anderson understand how to improve their designs to aid constructability and cost efficiency in future iterations of the design.

Solar is the new normal

The solar panels are integrated into the classroom’s roof, and the building will ship with them fully installed. Peter Anderson highlighted the significance of this by saying “Most people think of a solar unit as a completely separate and overly technical part of the building process. In this case, the solar design is so functionally, aesthetically, and physically integrated with the design that it just becomes normal. It’s no longer an add-on, it is part of the factory-controlled process and arrives fully assembled and operational when the building comes to the site.”

Leveraging design strategies on new projects

A lot of the strategies they’ve used on this project, including the integrated solar, are being incorporated into designs currently underway, including a new product they are working on called the Zebra Power Pod, which incorporates 22 high efficiency solar panels onto a readily transported shippable module that folds down to the size of a standard 20’ shipping container. Construction of the first prototype for that zero net energy project will start soon at a factory in Canada

And an award, to boot

On October 20th, Anderson Anderson were acknowledged by the Holcim Awards for this project. The Holcim Awards is a major international competition for sustainability focused projects that haven't yet been built. Their intention is to “encourage architects, planners, engineers and project owners to go beyond conventional notions of sustainable construction in their work and to harmonize ecological, social and economic concerns.”

The Andersons were flown out to Washington DC last month for an awards program at the National Building Museum, where each of the seven projects from North America winning awards were honored.

Next stop: Hawaii

Expect the next update in early 2012, when the building will be shipped and installed on its site in Hawaii!

Additional pictures

Click to enlarge...

Tags

net zero energy building, classroom, modular

Strategy Taxonomy

Net Zero Strategies

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David Fustino redesigns the desk lamp to improve product lifetime

external-contributor — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:51:44 +0000

In its recent Design for (Your) Product Lifetime Showcase, presented by Autodesk, Core77 asks five young designers to incorporate what they’ve learned at the Autodesk Sustainability Workshop by redesigning a commonplace object using Autodesk software. This latest installment features Massachusetts-based David Fustino’s take on the everyday desk lamp.

His solution is a magnetically assembled three-legged desk lamp named IRIS that structurally displays an LED bulb that elegantly diffuses its light. According to David, “LED bulbs are structurally adorned with beautiful heatsinks to dissipate heat and are engineered to last up to 46 years.”

“In such a ‘throw away society,’ he continues, “this LED bulb delivers longevity in a market of rapid obsolescence. If a user will use a single bulb for more than three decades, how can the bulb be cherished? IRIS was structurally designed to display this wonderful balance of design & engineering rather than concealing it within a fixture.”

David used Inventor Pro, Inventor Publisher and Eco Materials Advisor, and after watching the “Design for Durability” strategy video on Sustainability Workshop, learned how to consider material and manufacturing alternatives with the product's end of life in mind.

Check out his full interview to learn more about David and see what he did.

Then come back here to the Improving Product Lifetime section of Sustainability Workshop and learn more about what you can do.

Core77 serves as a gathering point for designers and enthusiasts alike by producing fresh content, design competitions, lecture series, parties, and exhibits.

Video created with Autodesk Inventor Publisher (learn how).

Article contributed by Paige Rodgers. Paige works at Autodesk and worked with Core77 to launch this design challenge.

Tags

product lifetime, lamps, furniture

Strategy Taxonomy

Improving Product Lifetime

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