From a conventional to a sustainable engineering design process: different shades of sustainability
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The challenge of realigning the present path of development on a sustainable trajectory is shared among all sectors of society, including engineering. To move towards a more sustainable practice of engineering, the design process needs to be modified in order for engineers to tackle the related issues in a structured manner. Such “sustainable design processes” (SDPs) are proposed in the recent literature. By reviewing conventional as well as sustainable design processes, this paper aims to identify the major differences between the former and the latter. Critical tasks missing from SDPs proposed so far are also pointed out, according to key observations emerging from the field of sustainability science. These tasks are then combined with contributions from reviewed SDPs into a novel integrated sustainable engineering design process (ISEDP). Instead of representing conventional and sustainable engineering as a dichotomy, this paper rather places both approaches on a continuum along which the engineer or an organization can position itself. For this purpose, a procedure based on the IESDP is proposed, allowing one to assess its progress towards sustainable engineering. The method reveals different shades of sustainability along six dimensions: (1) the structure of the design process; (2) the scope of sustainability issues considered; (3) the relevance of the indicators guiding the design; (4) the accuracy of the tools used to evaluate the indicators; (5) the potential improvements expected from the alternatives assessed when compared to conventional solutions; and (6) the approach to decision making.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it