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Example Design Processes

List of steps

  1. Problem identification/value statement
  2. Technical feasibility
  3. Affordably
  4. Maintainence
  5. Social acceptance
  6. Regulation
  7. Ability to collect taxes or revenues

 

Descriptions

  1. Problem identification and value statement: What is the problem that will be improved if you can find a solution. What value will be increased and who will benefit from these increases in value.
  2. What are the technical constraints and what is the criteria for a technically feasible solution. This is a crucial stopping rule for the search for solutions. The technology that employed are not limited to physical machines but include institutions and financial arrangements.
  3. What are the financial constraints? This sets the boundary for what is affordable. This part of the design process should consider the concept of bounded rationality which means that the cost (money and time) search for novel solutions shouldn’t exceed the cost of just solving the problem by existing brute force approaches. For example, instead of looking for some shiny machine that removes aquatic weeds from a lake, maybe you should get twenty people  out with bags to collect the weeds. The cost of the solution also should be compared to the value statement. Again, it might be cost-effective to remove the source of the problem rather than trying to solve it. For example, instead of trying to enforce new pollution controls on old cars, it might be more cost-effective to just by old clunkers from people. This approach has been used to remove energy hog refrigerators and get people to buy energy efficient appliances.
  4. What will be the on-going costs for maintaining the innovative solution? We’ll see later that using innovations that rely on new sets of tested components can increase the expected reliability. However, there are many examples of innovative solutions that worked well only to fail because of some part that was difficult to find or replace. I know of an example of a water purification system that failed due to in-availability of a small electronic control component and the whole system was just consumed by the jungle. This steps is related to social and institutional support for a project.
  5.    

 

Other examples - references

Ehrenfeld – Sustainability by design

Senge –

Gladwell – designs for working

van der Rynn – Ecological design