Engineering designers are constantly seeking ways to be more innovative, decisive, and informed of emerging technologies in the design of consumer products. Design tools, such as functional decomposition, morphology, and Pugh charts help stimulate the design process. However, many earlydesign-phase design tools require designers to have experiential or empirical design knowledge; many of these approaches are intractable for use by novice designers or designers with little experience designing for certain new objectives. In contrast to these current tools, using repositories to store product design information can provide additional and extensive design knowledge to the global design community. Using repository data-and resultant data-driven design approaches-in the design of new products can be especially impactful for DfX design objectives such as product sustainability, about which many engineering designers have limited knowledge. In this paper, we discuss the creation of a sustainable design repository -a collection of product data that includes environmental impact information. Through the initialization of a 47-product repository case study, we seek to create data-driven design processes that can influence designers to consider environmental sustainability. We found, for example, that in the first year of a product's life, 29-64% of the environmental impact occurs during the product's use phase, and that uncertainty in input data (such as component manufacturing location and disposal method) can significantly contribute to environmental impact variation. The creation of this sustainable design repository highlights the need for the consideration of input uncertainties when conducting environmental impact analysis. Additionally, the repository has also been used in tandem with machine learning to understand design decisions that lead to more sustainable products. This sustainable design repository enables subsequent data-driven design research in that it provides a large dataset on which machine learning approaches can operate.

The fuzzy front end of engineering design can present a difficult challenge, and as such, recent engineering design research has focused on guiding and influencing the way a designer ideates. Early ideation can be especially difficult when attempting to integrate specific design objectives in product design, called Design for X (DfX). This paper presents two experiments exploring the efficacy of a structured Design for the Environment (DfE) design method called the GREEn Quiz (Guidelines and Regulations for Early design for the Environment) that provides designers with sustainable design knowledge during the conceptual design phase. The GREEn Quiz operates on a web-based platform and queries the designer about their design concepts; an end-of-quiz report provides abstract DfE knowledge to designers. While this abstract knowledge was able to be applied by designers in a former study, we hypothesize that providing targeted, specific design strategies during conceptual design will enable novice designers to better integrate DfE. In this study, we created these DfE strategies, integrated these into the GREEn Quiz, and studied the efficacy of these strategies when presented to designers at both the expert and novice levels. Results suggest that respondents with access to the strategy-based GREEn Quiz produced concepts with evidence of more sustainable design decisions and higher solution quality scores. This work shows the promise of supplemental Design for the Environment methods for concept generation to enable the design of more environmentally sustainable products.

Problem Statement. The Seventh-day Adventist church has consistently advocated that adherents to this religion should be Christ-like in every aspect of their lives. They should be of service to others as they create a community of believers who are loving, kind, and considerate of others. These ideals form some of the characteristics of servant leadership. The question therefore is whether servant leadership is being practiced in the P-12 school system. No study related to the presence and practice of servant leadership in the P-12 school system of the NAD has been conducted. Research was needed to determine the perceptions of the evidence of servant leadership and the possible impact of gender, age, ethnic background, the size of the school in which the respondents worked, the gender of the principal, the respondents’ level of education, the configuration of school operation, and the type of SDA teaching certification that the respondents held. Methodology. A descriptive, explorative, cross-sectional survey was conducted. Participants in this study were selected by stratified random sampling from a population of 6,697 educators employed in the P-12 school system of the North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists. Data were collected using the Organizational Leadership Assessment and a demographic questionnaire that were mailed to 1,110 educators with a response rate of 33.4%. Two research questions and eight null hypotheses were tested. The first research question was analyzed using descriptive statistics and a comparison of means. The null hypotheses and remaining research question were tested at the .05 level of significance using one-way ANOVA. Results. Laub contends that organizations at or above a 4.0 composite mean score on the OLA can be identified as a servant organization. The composite means of all scores on this survey was found to be 3.91 which are very close to the Laub threshold score of 4.0. This would seem to indicate that the P-12 school system of the North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists is not a fully servant organization, but instead practices a positive version of paternalistic leadership. The results also indicated that there is a difference in how educators perceive the attributes of servant leadership based on the gender of the educator as well as the enrollment and configuration of school operation in which the educator works. However, there is no difference in how educators’ perceive the attributes based on age, ethnic background, gender of the principal, the educators’ level of education, as well as the SDA teaching certification.

The fuzzy front end of engineering design can present a difficult challenge, and as such, recent engineering design research has focused on guiding and influencing the way a designer ideates. Early ideation can be especially difficult when attempting to integrate specific design objectives in product design, called Design for X (DfX). Some examples of DfX are Design for Manufacturing (DfM), Design for Assembly (DfA), Design for Function (DfF), and Design for Safety (DfS). This paper will present two experiments exploring the efficacy of a structured Design for the Environment (DfE) design method called the GREEn Quiz (Guidelines and Regulations for Early design for the Environment) that provides designers with sustainable design knowledge during the conceptual design phase. The GREEn Quiz operates on a web-based platform and queries the designer about their design concepts; an end-of-quiz report provides abstract DfE knowledge to designers. While this abstract knowledge was able to be applied by designers in a former study, we hypothesize that providing targeted, specific design strategies during conceptual design may enable better integration in concept generation by novice designers. In this study, we created these DfE strategies, embedded these in the GREEn Quiz, and studied the efficacy of these strategies when presented to designers at both the expert and novice levels. Experimental results suggest that respondents with access to the strategy-based GREEn Quiz produced concepts with evidence of more sustainable design decisions and higher solution quality scores when compared to previous respondents and the control groups. This research encourages the consideration of downstream environmental impact knowledge during conceptual design, resulting in lower-impact products regardless of the previous DfE expertise of the designer.

The goal of this research is to characterize the effects of use patterns on the environmental sustainability of consumer products, and to enable decision making throughout design processes that encourages product sustainability. Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) are currently used to evaluate the environmental impact of a product, but there can be considerable uncertainty in these analyses, especially relating to the use phase of the product. To better understand this uncertainty, we conducted environmental impact assessments of 20 household products, and employed two uncertainty quantification approaches to accommodate variation in the use phase of these products. The results from each product were then compared to products with similar attributes to find generalizations. This knowledge was integrated into decision trees so designers can better understand the degree to which use-phase uncertainty can affect quantitative measures of environmental impact before performing LCAs. This work enables designers to make more informed decisions about the intended use and use lifetimes of consumer products, potentially leading to a reduced environmental impact of this life cycle phase.