Prabhu Kandachar

Assessing sustainability in nature-inspired design

In the field of sustainable product development, a new perspective for approaching sustainability has been advocated, challenging designers and engineers to aim beyond ‘reducing unsustainability’. Several design strategies – including Biomimicry and Cradle to Cradle – have been suggested for developing truly sustainable, or ‘beneficial’, products. But do these strategies help in developing such products, and how to assess their ‘sustainability’? Based on a review of the objectives in nature-inspired design, we argue that assessing environmental sustainability is not straightforward. Whereas both Biomimicry and Cradle to Cradle build on the perspective of ‘achieving sustainability’, current life-cycle assessment-based tools are geared towards reducing current impacts. As a consequence, existing tools are insufficiently equipped for the purpose of the assessment: they do not cover some of the main results that nature-inspired design is set out to accomplish. To be able to include these results, we propose two new constituents to current life-cycle-based product assessment: assessing against conditions of sustainability and assessing ‘achievement’, the extent to which these conditions of sustainability have been achieved. Furthermore, the product context needs to be included for assessing beneficial impacts. This article discusses how these constituents can contribute to an assessment tool that enables designers and engineers to assess the development of environmentally sustainable solutions.

Design and Development of Products and Services at the Base of the Pyramid: A Review of Issues and Solutions

The base of the world income pyramid, generally called the ‘Base of the Pyramid’ (BoP), consists of four billion people with average per day income of less than four dollars. Over the past several years, the design and development of products and services at the BoP (BoP people as producers and consumers as well) has been investigated by several authors from different disciplines. A literature review showed that the issues (i.e. constraints) in designing and developing products and services at the BoP and ingredients of solutions addressing these issues have not been synthesised. Furthermore, quantitative findings on these issues and solution-ingredients are lacking. This paper addresses these gaps by pulling together the issues and solution-ingredients in the BoP from the reviewed literature and comparing these with a large study found in this literature. In addition, through the analysis of the data available in this large study, we extracted some quantitative findings on these issues and solution-ingredients, and identified relationships between them. We have discussed the practical implications of these findings. This study adds to the growing body of literature on the sustainable development at the BoP.

A Mobile Monitoring System of Blood Pressure for Underserved in China by Information and Communication Technology Service

High blood pressure (BP, hypertension) is a leading chronic condition in China and has become the main risk factor for many high-risk diseases, such as heart attacks. However, the platform for chronic disease measurement and management is still lacking, especially for underserved Chinese. To achieve the early diagnosis of hypertension, one BP monitoring system has been designed. The proposed design consists of three main parts: user domain, server domain, and channel domain. All three units and their materialization, validation tests on reliability, and usability are described in this paper, and the conclusion is that the current design concept is feasible and the system can be developed toward sufficient reliability and affordability with further optimization. This idea might also be extended into one platform for other physiological signals, such as blood sugar and ECG.

Design of wireless mobile monitoring of blood pressure for underserved in China by using short messaging service

High blood pressure (hypertension) is the leading chronic disease in China and has become the main factor for many high risk diseases such as diabetes, heart attack and cancer. At present, there are more than 100 million hypertension patients in China, but only 44% of them have been diagnosed. In some cities like Shanghai, hypertension is increasing at an annual rate of over 10%. For early diagnosis of hypertension and other chronic diseases, a system has been designed and presented in this paper. The proposed design consists of three main parts: a wrist Blood Pressure (BP) measurement unit, a server unit and a terminal unit. Blood Pressure is detected and the data acquired by sensors intelligently. The data is then transmitted to the remote server unit located at Community Healthcare Centers/Points (CHC/P) by using Short Messaging Service (SMS), and notification information is sent to the terminal unit to inform users if patientpsilas BP is abnormal.

Cradle to Cradle in Product Development: A Case Study of Closed-Loop Design

Cradle to Cradle (C2C) challenges designers to create products with a beneficial impact on environment, society and economy. While existing research has highlighted merits and critical points of the strategy, an understanding of its application -how Cradle to Cradle helps designers to develop such products- is lacking.

Materials and Social Sustainability

The term “Sustainability” has evolved during the last four decades to encompass 3 major aspects: Social-, Economic-, and Environmental sustainability. During the same period, the world has focused, however, mainly on economic sustainability. Rapid economic growth has resulted in enormous material prosperity, but also in a substantial increase in environmental impacts and a rapid depletion of material resources. To provide a high quality of life for a predicted world population of nine billion in 2050, the neglected aspect: social sustainability deserves urgent attention. Renewable resources offer good opportunities in this context. This chapter focuses on materials and social sustainability. Adding value to agricultural materials, such as natural fibers, by design and innovation can result in a positive impact on the quality of life of millions of peasants and farmers in the developing world.

Assessing Material Properties on Sensorial Scales

Product designers are expected to create products transferring certain meanings. Materials of products are used for supporting the intended meanings in product design; one material may convey luxury, another material can be associated with a particular culture. It is to be expected that materials are attributed different meanings in different products and contexts, affected by certain key variables such as form, function, manufacturing processes, use, and user characteristics. The sensorial properties of materials (e.g. smoothness, transparency, softness, etc.) are one of these key variables which collaborate with the other key variables in design in order to create unique sensorial experiences and meanings. There is a growing interest among scholars in the design domain for developing new methods and tools to guide designers particularly in creating sensorial experiences through material choices. Studies conducted for this aim mainly focus on understanding the links between certain formal characteristics of materials (i.e. physical and sensorial properties) and the affective responses of users. The main question of this paper stems from this point: Can people properly evaluate the materials of products in terms of their sensorial properties regarding different sensory modalities? This main question is investigated by measuring the level of agreement among a group of non-design students on the sensorial properties of ten different materials. The results of the study show that perceptions of some sensorial properties can be more affected by the type of user-product interaction and by other sensorial properties (or other sensory domains). The paper consists of a comprehensive discussion on the results of the study.Copyright

New market, new challenge, new opportunity (1) -Overview of China rural healthcare & design methodology

China has a largest population in the world (1.3Billion) and 0.9 Billion is rural population. Most of rural people earn less than US

A constitutive model for long-term behavior of polymers

3/day, and they are called “Base of the economic pyramid (BoP)”. Compared with high level market, BoP is a new market, which means a low individual profit, but a large population. This paper discusses the healthcare issues in rural China (BoP) and study their healthcare needs through field study and case studies. This research is carried out within the framework of “Design for Sustainability at Base-of-the-Pyramid (BoP)” programme of the School of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. And the aim of this research is to provide a low cost advanced healthcare product design, which will meet poors needs and create a business case for commercial partners.

Responsible Design and Product Innovation from a Capability Perspective

This paper describes a constitutive model for long-term behavior of plastics. The Struik theory of physical aging is adapted for use with the earlier proposed generalization of the Schapery model. Experimental data on creep and recovery behavior for different elapsed times are necessary to build the model. The parameter identification procedure is based on a minimization of the total error between experimental data and model prediction. The model has been verified using extensive experimental data on long-term creep and recovery of polypropylene, reported by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL, Teddington, U.K.). The model has shown the ability to work with the independent data; it sufficiently describes the variation of strains in time for loading history, which contains several loading steps. The maximum deviation of the model prediction from the experimental data in a control set is less than 11% to 12%. The average deviation is less than 4%.