Introduction
Traditionally, engineering designers designed and manufacturing engineers manufactured the design. In the late 1950s, engineer and statistician Genichi Taguchi suggested that quality should be placed in the hands of the designer. This revelation prompted a design and manufacturing revolution and was the catalyst that drove production techniques into quality mass production. Though production techniques had been pioneered by inventors and industrialists such as Samuel Colt and Henry Ford, quality of manufacture still largely remained the domain of craftsmen and artisans to produce and create quality goods.
There are a great number of demands placed on the modern design and production environment. Some of these are traditional demands, such as that of reducing cost. Newer demands, however, are becoming prominent, such as those that require reduced environmental impact when a new design is created. This relatively new discipline is sustainable engineering design.
Taguchi was one of the first proponents of placing the emphasis on designers and the idea that designers should take control and specify quality. The greater demands and expectations placed on new products effectively demand that designers take a greater role in specifying and controlling the new product, from its inception right through manufacture to packaging and even marketing. This is, effectively, Sustainable Engineering Design. The design function can no longer be compartmentalized, since it is the only function that can oversee and control the entire process of product creation from “cradle to grave.”
It is within the designer’s gift to apply sustainable design techniques for a long-life product. It is the designer and only the designer who has the overview of the whole design and manufacture process. This whole-life process involves the following elements:
• Specifying sustainable materials
• Designing for sustainability
• Designing for sustainable manufacture
• Designing for sustainable use
• Designing for sustainable maintenance
• Designing for sustainable disposal
The designer must therefore take control of the whole-life process. This technique is termed total design control.
This book examines traditional design techniques and offers suggestions as to how these techniques can be incorporated into total design control. To achieve this goal, the traditional approach to design compartmentalization must change to a global design approach. Traditionally designers design and manufacturers manufacture, but the new methodology demands that these two major disciplines be combined and joined by several other disciplines. This means that designers’ attitudes and approaches have to change to a global, whole-life design strategy. This book shows how to achieve that goal.
January 2014