Whole Systems and Lifecycle Thinking - Part 1

Autodesk Support

Jun 14, 2018

The things we make create environmental impacts throughout their lifecycles, from manufacturing to disposal. The best opportunities for saving resources like materials and energy can often be uncovered early in the design process by identifying the most important problems to solve.

Whole systems thinking allows you to see the big-picture of the social, environmental, and technical systems that a product is a part of. This can help you identify new possibilities for innovation.

Lifecycle thinking allows you to quantify environmental impacts so that you can prioritize, set metrics around, and most effectively reduce them. This process is not just about making things “less bad.” It can help unlock your creativity and lead to game-changing innovations.

Throughout the design process, there are many sustainable design tools and strategies you can draw from.

Companion to the video: Script and Illustrations

We're going to start by looking at the two most important global principles of sustainable design: Whole Systems and Life-Cycle Thinking.
Here's the challenge: Assume you're designing uh.
let's say a clothes dryer, and you want to make one that's more sustainable without driving costs way up or performance way down, how would you do it?

Well, you could let your imagination just run wild and jump in anywhere.
But how would you know when you have a good answer, before you even know what problem you're really trying to solve?
Which approaches should you go with? And how will you make the tough decisions when two strategies conflict?

STEP 1: Define the problem by looking at the Whole System

Before you start jumping to conclusions and fixating on any final design solutions, the first step is to more deeply define the problem by looking at the whole system.
So let's expand our thinking from the dryer to the larger process of clothes getting dirty, being washed, and being dried.
It looks something like this.

Now look at the system even more broadly. A marketing person might be able to tell you about how customers actually use their dryers. A manufacturing expert might point out obvious production limitations you'll need to work around. Getting other perspectives early on is always helpful. These kinds of insights help you understand and bound the problem.

STEP 2: Prioritize objectives by assessing life-cycle impacts

Now that you see the system, it's time to zero in on how you want to improve it by identifying the biggest impacts and minimizing them.
To optimize for environmental performance, you need to consider impacts through the entire lifecycle of your product or service.

We'll keep our example simple by looking only at the hardware in the system. The washer and dryer impact the environment through their manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal.
At each one of these stages there may be greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, air pollution, toxins, or other environmental impacts.

Your analysis should measure these impacts to the best of your ability. The most thorough way to do this is called Lifecycle Assessment.
You may want to compare your results against some benchmark.

What's the minimum possible amount of energy or material use for what you're trying to make?
In our case, you'll find that reducing the energy use during the life of the dryer offers the most opportunity for improvement - more than raw material use, waste, or any other factors.

The important thing at this stage is to realize where the environmental impacts are coming from - and quantify them in some way so that you know your priorities and can set metrics around them. That way, you can make the case for your environmental goals and fit them in with other project requirements.

Ok. Using systems and lifecycle thinking, we've narrowed down our challenge from "Build a More Sustainable Clothes Dryer" to "Use less energy to dry clothes."
Now that we've defined the problem, how do we solve it?

STEP 3: Brainstorm solutions by looking at the whole system

You might jump ahead to the obvious solution of making the dryer's heating system more efficient.
But you're likely to find that heating systems are already quite efficient. And the incremental gains you can make by re-engineering them dry up pretty quickly.

Instead of making small improvements to one part of the clothes drying process, let's look for solutions by looking again at the whole system.
Notice that the washing machine supplies the wet clothes to the dryer. The wetter the clothes are, the more energy they take to dry - right?

Now we can ask new questions like, might we save energy by delivering the clothes to the dryer in a less-wet condition?
Well, a washing machine already shares in the drying process by spinning the clothes to a damp state with centrifugal force.

And here's a chance to innovate. A washing machine with a more effective spin cycle might use slightly more energy, but lets the dryer save a ton. It turns out one solution for a more sustainable dryer is a slightly more energy intensive washing machine!

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