Unleashing the Next Wave of Engineering Innovation  

GreenerBuildings has a post on the Rocky Mountain Institute's 10XE initiative - Unleashing the Next Wave of Engineering Innovation.

There’s a joke e-mail that seems to circulate on the Web every eight months or so.

It includes images of outrageous design blunders, like a surveillance camera mounted behind and pointing at the back of the monitor it feeds. Or there’s a picture of a faucet that’s about six inches away from the sink into which the water should fall. There’s another of a man using an automatic teller machine that’s about nine feet above the ground.

All good for a laugh, but the truth is, bad design is more common than most of us realize. Bad engineering design, specifically, is simply wasteful. Poorly designed processes and systems gobble up energy and resources as if they were free or nearly free, and the inefficiency is generally invisible to most observers, including consumers who have to pay for the energy and resources.

Throughout the Rocky Mountain Institute’s (RMI) 27-year existence, its staff has sought to influence the design, building, and retrofitting of power and industrial plants, commercial and residential buildings, and vehicles and transportation systems early in the development process so they’re designed correctly upfront, eliminating costly late redesigns and inefficient outcomes.

One of the basic challenges our practioners run into, year after year, is that the people creating inefficient processes and systems are simply unaware they are doing so, and they don’t know how to do things differently. The reasons are many and complex, but often boil down to a few familiar parameters: assumed cost (e.g., capital resources, risk, reward, etc.), time (e.g., regulatory requirements, demand, etc.), tradition (e.g., what has worked before), and skills.

“Engineering schools don’t specifically teach bad engineering design,” notes RMI’s Alok Pradhan, “It’s just that current engineering practice is very siloed and there’s a lack of integration and whole-system consideration. Designs are typically optimized for the wrong parameters. That is, they will optimize the component individually, and the pieces -- when they fit together -- don’t work that great as a system.”

Pradhan is the project manager for 10xE, which is short for Factor Ten Engineering. Several years ago, RMI kicked off this modest project to address these problems in engineering. This RMI initiative is fairly straightforward: The goal is to create a series of teaching tools that will help engineers design the things they design using radically less energy and resources than they otherwise would have, without compromising performance. These teaching materials -- revolving around a casebook of extremely efficient projects and systems -- will be used to teach efficiency concepts and design to both engineering students and practitioners.

10xE has its genesis in the Factor Four notion put forth by Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins in their 1995 report to the Club of Rome, “Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use.” In the report, the authors argue that energy and resources can be used much more efficiently, to the tune of at least four times as efficient. “Factor Ten represents Amory Lovins’s belief that we can do even better,” notes Alok. “It might not necessarily be 10 times the efficiency. It might be eight times or six times, but the basic premise of this project is to see, when these principles are applied, what’s possible.”