Whole Systems Design and Factor 10 Engineering
March 13, 2012 at 10:36PM You can find an accessible formulation and starting point for two fundamental practices underlying key sustainability strategies -- radical resource productivity and whole systems thinking -- at the Rocky Mountain Institute.
10xE: Factor Ten Engineering
. . . aims to help engineers, architects and their clients attackresource-intensive design problems, such as manufacturing processes, buildings and vehicles, using RMI's whole-system principles in order to produce fundamentally better results.
Whole-System Design: Optimizing Not Just Parts, But Entire Systems
Designers and decision-makers too often define problems narrowly, without identifying their causes or connections. This merely shifts or multiplies problems. Whole-systems design—the opposite of that dis-integrated approach—typically reveals lasting, elegantly frugal solutions with multiple benefits, which enable us to transcend ideological battles and unite all parties around shared goals.
Our lives are embedded in systems: families, communities, industries, economies, ecosystems. The machines we rely on are also systems, which have increasingly profound effects on the human and biotic systems around them.
Understanding the dynamics of systems is integral to RMI's approach. Not only does systems thinking point the way to solutions to particular resource problems, but it also reveals interconnections between problems, which often permits one solution to be leveraged to create many more.
Start here, Whole Systems Design, and here, Factor 10 Engineering.
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