Environmental Life Cycle Assessment in Design - International Symposium

Tuesday - Thursday, March 30 - April 1, 2021

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Organized by the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment

Truly sustainable design is increasingly driven by a steady stream of reliable data. What was once a field that relied almost completely on heuristics, sustainable design now leverages new methods and insights gleaned from computationally guided workflows in conjunction with robust databases. Environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) provides a fact-based scientific approach to evaluate design decisions. Grounded in a deep understanding of the environmental impacts associated with human-directed natural resource flows and the industrial processes that transform them. Tracking current human impacts on the ecosphere in increasingly detailed ways is critical to reducing and even reversing the negative environmental effects of providing for a global population of nearly 8 billion people.

This symposium unites two parallel cultures engaged in system thinking: designers working at many different scales and the LCA community of researchers, data experts, and information interface providers. It will explore areas of common cause and mission in two sectors: building and transportation. Designers working in these sectors are entrusted with at once responding to market forces by bringing novel products and systems into the world while simultaneously safeguarding public health safety and welfare. LCA experts provide ways to improve the ecological profiles of product development through quantitative analyses of clearly bounded system conditions and carefully qualified studies. Through three half days of sequential and parallel presentations and working sessions, we will come together to define current and future opportunities brought about through leaps in computational speed that promise to augment sustainable design processes at multiple scales.

Architecture:
Andrew Whalley, Grimshaw
@ksimonen, Carbon Leadership Forum, U. Washington

Transportation:
Lynn Bell, Goodyear
Milena Rangelov, Federal Highway Administration

Interiors:
@Roderick_Bates, KieranTimberlake/Tally
Connie Hensler, Interface

LCA Tools and Data:
@StephCarlisle, Carbon Leadership Forum
Christoph Koffler, Sphera

Products:
Chris Jordan, Chris Jordan Photographic Arts
Jeff Zeman, True North Collective

Computation:
Jim Fava, Anthesis
George Matos, NVIDIA

>> Register for the Conference!

Will you attend? Questions or comments? Message @cays!

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We welcome all CLF members! As co-chair of this event, I cannot think of a community better prepared to engage with the topics we have curated and the guests we have invited. Please feel free to ask me questions about the symposium and send the invitation around to your friends, colleagues, and any students. Students can attend for free! When registering for General Admission, students can use discount code: SRATE2021 to get a 100% discount. Looking forward to seeing you at the end of the month!