AUGIWorld Magazine September/October 2007

On The Page Back Sustainability and Product Design I’ve been thinking about Ed, my late father-in-law, this summer, as one granddaughter gets married, intending to bring a great-grandchild to her first anniversary party, and the other has met the love of her life (we hope!). Ed was fond of saying: “There are three types of people in the world, people that make things happen, people that know what’s happening, and people that ask ‘What happened?’” Ed also got a little piece of the action for every seal assembled or replaced in a General Motors automatic transmission in the 1960s and ’70s. Those little pieces added up nicely for him and my aging mother-in-law. As designers, we are responsible for putting a lot of stuff into the environment. Actually, we mostly rearrange the stuff from one environmental state to another (excluding the “Pet Rock”). We design homes that may be constructed in the tens of thousands, widgets that may sell millions of units, and machines that serve people in every conceivable way. All of these things consume energy, either in their manufacture, use, or both. Most will be in service for years, decades, and perhaps for some, centuries. We can make little pieces add up. David Kingsley www.autodesk.com/minisites/green/ Autodesk supports green design in numerous ways through this portion of their website. Details on green ideas using Autodesk products are listed there. I encourage you to explore this site and consider how these design principals can apply to your work. that global warming is a hoax, you’d be remiss to ignore a growing and future market. The antithesis to, or dichotomy in this, is our belief that you can fix anything by throwing money at it. People are coming to realize that a premium must be paid today to head off environmental degradation in the future, and are willing to temper their guilt by buying more expensive green products. Environmental sublimation I grew up near Detroit, worked in the automotive industry, and I’ve always been a gear head. Regardless of the environmental ramifications, I still entertain the goal of driving a 12-cylinder car (or Formula 1 car, regardless of the number of cylinders) as fast as my fear of death will allow. I’ve recently altered that goal with the fantasy of owning a Tesla Roadster, the environmentally conscious person’s midlife-crisis mobile. AUGIWorld Green Edition What happened? More and more people are coming to the realization that energy is now an issue of national security. It dawned on some sooner than others, but still the majority of the population is blissfully unaware of the fact that they can reduce their environmental impact, or “carbon footprint,” without lowering their standard of living. As designers, in this regard it is incumbent upon us to take some responsibility for those who don’t know what’s happening, never will, or know and disagree. We can do it for them in such a way that they won’t even know it. While AUGIWorld continues to be made available to some AUGI members in print form, AUGI launched the Green edition of AUGIWorld in July. Think of the Green Edition as AUGIWorld Download Edition 2.0. There are a lot of usability improvements making it easier to navigate, zoom, and use hyperlinks. Eventually you may find it easier to use than the paper edition. Obviously, no trees are harmed in the making of the AUGIWorld Green edition. It is all too easy during the design of a product to specify the cheapest or most available component or material. As designers, we need to start looking a little further back to determine the source behind the source. We need to start looking further forward to determine where the stuff in our product is going to be when it is obsolete or worn out. Consider the fact that there are two to three pounds of lead inside every old CRT-based television or computer monitor. We need to design products that will use a little less of something, re-use something, and consume less energy to do whatever it does every day. References: www.treehugger.com www.teslamotors.com www.anti-environmental.com David Kingsley served from 1999-2004 on the AUGI Board of Directors and is the Director of Electrons at CADPlayer Web Courseware. He can be reached at djkingsley@cad-tv.com. w w w. A U G I . c o m Your little pieces will add up My cynical side Someone, probably P. T. Barnum or Samuel Clemens, said (and I paraphrase), “The shortest path to a person’s heart and mind is through the wallet.” There is a growing market for green products. Even if you believe 34 http://www.autodesk.com/mini-sites/green/ http://www.treehugger.com http://www.teslamotors.com http://www.anti-environmental.com http://www.AUGI.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of AUGIWorld Magazine September/October 2007

Contents The CAD Manager Feature: A Good First Impression ADT and SketchUp Team for Presentations Accessing Values: Now or Later Finding the 3D in Map 3D: Surface Visualization Rocks & Rock Walls Autodesk University 2007 Preview The Missing Link On the Back Page

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