Sustainable Design Engineering and Science: Selected Challenges and Case Studies

As an instrument of sustainable development, sustainable design intends to conceive of products, processes, and services that meet the needs of society while striking a balance between economic and environmental interests [1]. By definition, the benefits of sustainable design are publicly shared, and to achieve them individual designers must place their decisions into a context larger than any single company, and even larger than the society or generation within which the design functions. It is therefore difficult to define sustainable design in an operational sense, and thus sustainable design is easy to ignore, especially in the fast paced and competitive process of bringing design artifacts to market. Complicating sustainable design further is the fact that environmental impacts depend on the consequences of specific stressors, rather than on which product or process causes the stressor (e.g. the atmosphere is indifferent to a kg of CO2 saved by changing the design of a refrigerator versus changing the design of a television). Owing to these characteristics, sustainable design requires consistent and well-coordinated implementation to be achieved in a meaningful way. Given the challenge of coordinating the complex trade-offs between economic, societal, and environmental factors influenced by design, it can be expected that governments interested in operationalizing sustainable development will begin to directly legislate the feasible space of options available to designers. This has been the approach in the EU, where the last few years alone have seen 1