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While significant advances in our understanding of the behavior of engineered nanoparticles in the environment continue, there remains a need to engage the nanoparticle research community directly in the development and evaluation of environmentally benign nanoparticles to ensure that nanomaterial‐based industries emerge as tools for sustainability rather than environmental liabilities. Current research efforts aimed at understanding the environmental implications of nanotechnology emphasize existing groups of nanoparticles and products already in commercial distribution. While this is clearly necessary, this approach fails to identify and address the many tradeoffs associated with product performance and environmental quality. We believe this to be a critical gap in the ongoing exploration of nanostructured materials and their properties and applications. We posit that a number of issues are not being holistically addressed, including resource availability and allocation, manufacturing energy requirements and embodied energy, material efficiency, environmental properties of nanomaterials and nanoproducts, and waste generation. An interdisciplinary approach to research, based on the life cycle paradigm and devoted to the identification, investigation, synthesis, testing, and analysis of groups of new, more environmentally conscious nanoparticles is needed. (© 2011 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

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Special Issue on Collaborative EngineeringDesign of complex engineering systems is increasingly becoming a collaborative task among designers or design teams that are physically, geographically, and temporally distributed. The complexity of modern products means that a single designer or design team can no longer manage the complete product development effort. Developing products without sufficient expertise in a broad set of disciplines can result in extended product development cycles, higher development costs, and quality problems. On the other hand, ensuring comprehensive technical proficiency in a world where trends are toward more multidisciplinary design can become a costly undertaking for a company.Driven by such issues, companies are increasingly staffing only their core competencies in-house and depending on other firms to provide the complementary design knowledge and design effort needed for a complete product. Designers are no longer merely exchanging geometric data, but also more general knowledge about design and the product development process, including specifications, design rules, constraints, and rationale. Furthermore, this exchange of knowledge more and more often crosses corporate boundaries. As design becomes increasingly knowledge-intensive and collaborative, the need for computational frameworks to support a collaborative product development environment becomes more critical. There are several research and development issues that need to be addressed for the effective realization of such a collaborative design environment; the first issue of JCISE ͑March 2001͒ contains several papers that are pertinent to our discussions. These issues, along with relevant papers from this special issue, are discussed below.Architectural Frameworks. Software frameworks are complex software applications, or software systems composed of an integration of multiple applications, designed to provide an infrastructure for addressing a given problem. Key issues associated with development of software frameworks include traditional systems engineering principles, such as requirements gathering, functional analysis, architecture design, detailed design, validation, etc. Concerns of interest in the development of architecture frameworks include the traditional importance of cost, quality, schedule, and functionality, as well as key needs for usability, interoperability, modularity, and effective integration into a collaborative product development process. Examples of architecture frameworks include blackboard-based systems, service oriented architectures, and support for multimedia interactions.Shared Representations. The representation of product information that supports sharing forms the fundamental cornerstone of any collaborative engineering ͑or collaborative product develop-ment͒ application. This product information should include not only the geometric data corresponding to the physical parts and their relationships, but it should include non-geometric information such as material characteristics, function...