Sustainability standards and design
Research at NIST
Research area: Sustainable design and manufacturing
As a postdoctoral fellow at NIST, I worked in the area of sustainable design and manufacturing. We collaborated with DOE, DOC, EPA, ANSI, Xerox and other organizations. I worked on three different projects. A short description of each of these projects is listed below.
Sustainable product design: Sustainable societies require the use of sustainable products. First, we understand sustainability through the development of measures to assess sustainability of manufactured products using Triple Bottom Line (TBL) - people, planet, and profit. Next, we develop a method to assess product sustainability using TBL. The proposed measures help designers to assess sustainability of design alternatives during the initial phase of design and point out ways to reduce the impact [7].
Sustainability standards portal: There are a multitude of standards and regulations related to sustainability. In order to synthesize this variety of standards and regulations it is important to analyze them from information and modeling points of view that will consider the requirements of various stakeholders such as an industry, consumer, researcher, government, and software developer. In this work, we proposed a methodology for the analysis of these standards and regulations using Zachman framework, taking into account multiple perspectives and stakeholders requirements. The landscape of sustainability standards and the results of the analyses are made available on the web through the Sustainability Standards Portal. URL: http://www.mel.nist.gov/msid/SSP/ .
Sustainability indicator repository: There are many indicators and related metrics for assessing sustainability of products. To compare performances of different companies, there is a need to harmonize these indicators and prioritize them. In this work, we collect, analyze, and harmonize a large number of indicators into few set of most prominent indicators. Next, we develop metrics for these set of indicators with measurement methodology and usage. URL: http://www.mel.nist.gov/msid/SMIR/index.html .
References
[1] Prabir Sarkar and Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2008. Studying engineering design creativity- developing a common definition and associated measures. In, John Gero (Ed.) Studying Design Creativity, Springer Verlag, 2008.
[2] Prabir Sarkar and Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2010. Supporting design research through a protocol analyzing tool - Idea Transcribe. Submitted to Artifact. Taylor and Francis.
[3] Prabir Sarkar and Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2010. Assessing design creativity: Measure of novelty and usefulness. Design Studies, Elsevier (accepted).
[4] Prabir Sarkar, Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2007. Understanding search in design, International conference on engineering design, ICED’07, 28 - 31 August 2007, Paris.
[5] Amaresh Chakrabarti, Prabir Sarkar, B. Leelavathamma, B.S. Nataraju, 2005, A functional representation for aiding biomimetic and artificial inspiration of new ideas. Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design and Manufacturing, AIEDAM. Vol 19, Issue - 2. Cambridge.
[6] Prabir Sarkar and Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2007. The effect of representation of triggers on design outcomes. Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design and Manufacturing, AIEDAM. Journal’s special issue on multi-modal design. Vol 22. Isseue -2. Cambridge.
[7] Prabir Sarkar, Sudarsan Rachuri, Hyo Won Suh, Kevin Lyons, Ram D. Sriram, 2009. Method for measuring sustainability of products. ASME 2009 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, San Diego, California, USA.
List of journal publications in these areas
List of international conferences according to areas of research is here.