<p>The focus of environmental work in manufacturing companies has increasingly shifted from end-of-pipe solutions to the environmental performance of products and services. The product development process is central to creating value for customers. This thesis argues that companies can simultaneously create value for consumers and be profitable while taking environmental considerations into account.</p><p>Modernising ecodesign means taking advantage of environmental benefits and the innovation potential when developing solutions rather than using ecodesign simply to ensure that legal requirements or customer demands are met. Ecodesign is a strategic issue and should be included in early product development activities, such as for project selection and when setting product targets. There is also need to perform ecodesign according to the characteristics of specific development processes as for radical product development or when developing integrated solutions, using a combination of services and products.</p><p>This thesis reports on the findings from five different research studies, all of which adopted a qualitative approach in which the emphasis falls on exploring and creating understanding and meaning. The studies focused on three areas of ecodesign: A) rethinking approaches for manufacturing companies, B) setting environmental project targets and project selection and C) redesign of products.</p><p>Recommendations on how to modernise ecodesign have been developed and can be summarised in six points:</p><p>• Perform ecodesign both vertically and horizontally in a company.</p><p>• Increase interaction between organisational units.</p><p>• Take advantage of innovation potential in products, services, user behaviour and the delivery and take-back systems.</p><p>• Take environmental considerations into account in the project selection process.</p><p>• Set environmental targets for ensuring that environmental considerations are taken when developing innovative solutions.</p><p>• Develop ecodesign procedures that fit the characteristics of the development process</p>

Thesis (M. Arch.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes special study report entitled: 'Pattern language' of elderly indoors living. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes special report study entitled: Interactive circulation space for elderly. Includes bibliographical references.

In the recent years, more and more manufacturing firms recognize the benefit of providing products together with related services with an aim to gain higher profits as compared to supplying products without additional services. On the other hand, the competition in the global markets has been increased dramatically through increased sales of services in order to gain additional value for their products. In addition, several environmental challenges such as climate change, pollution, global warming impact, greenhouse gases emissions have played a vital role by influencing on the production protocols and trend of the companies. These challenges forced manufacturing countries to take into consideration environmentally conscious approach to their design thinking and industrial production processes. As a result, it became an important drive for manufacturing industries to shift from traditional product-oriented to service-oriented business models that has been witnessed during the last few years.   The objective of this study research is to develop common questions that capture fundamental and common issues about Integrated Product Service Engineering (IPSE), Design for Environment (DFE) and Engineering education are effectives for industries to check and develop their knowledge, because the Engineering education plays a necessary role in associating socio-ethical knowledge with scientific and technological advances. The strategy taken to conduct this thesis task was first to study and understand the concept of Product Service System (PSS), IPSE, and Ecodesign as well as Engineering Education. Informative knowledge on these concepts were collected by reviewing several related journal articles, CIRP IPS2 conference proceedings.   In this thesis the concepts of PSS, IPSE, DFE and Engineering Education discussed to develop the key common questions and issues to address the environmental, economic and social problems. Since PSS aims to reduce consumption through alternative schemes of product use as well as to increase overall resource productivity and dematerialization, but IPSE does not focus on a single factor but incorporates a wide range of factors such as environmental, social and economic issues. Whilst one of the main problems in this research focused on how to develop and strengthen the relationship between the academia and industry, and how this relation can be used to improve the academic performance and scientific research at universities and transfer them to industry.   Sustainability and the life cycle concept have become a main solution for various problems such as a growing world population and a change in the industrial culture to come. As results Ecodesign and environmental considerations, financial aspects, product improvement as well as the commercial aspects were discussed in this project by understanding the previous concepts. The university considered as an important base of cultivating the talents, basic of inputs business organizations which help them to develop and improve their level of performance and quality of their products and services, and enhance its competitive position in the market. Changes in organized science further encouraged university interests in expanding technology transfer, because the scientific disciplines play an important role in influencing the type of interactions with industry as well as the University and Industry collaboration became the basic method of solving the problems to achieve (environmental, economic and social) sustainability.

This thesis documents the design, manufacturing, and assembly of a flexible thermoelectric device. Such a device has immediate use in haptics, medical, and athletic applications. The governing theory behind the device is explained and a one dimensional heat transfer model is developed to estimate performance. This model and consideration for the manufacturing and assembly possibilities are the drivers behind the decisions made in design choices. Once the design was finalized, manufacturing methods for the various components were explored. The system was created by etching copper patterns on a copper/polyimide laminate and screen printing solder paste onto the circuits. Thermoelectric elements were manually assembled. Several proof of concept prototypes were made to validate the approach. Development of the assembly process also involved proof of concept prototyping and partial assembly analysis. A full scale device was produced and tested to assess its thermoelectric behavior. The resulting performance was an interface temperature drop of 3 °C in 10 seconds with 1.5 A supplied, and a maximum temperature drop of 9.9 °C after 2 minutes with 2.5 A supplied. While the measured behavior fell short of predictions, it appears to be adequate for the intended purpose. The differences appear to be due to larger than expected thermal resistances between the device and the heat sinks and some possible degradation of the thermoelectric elements due to excess solder coating the edges.

The growing demand for high performance systems in modern computing technology drives the development of advanced and high speed designs in I/O structures. Due to their data rate and architecture, however, testing of the high speed serial interfaces becomes more expensive when using conventional test methods. In order to alleviate the test cost issue, a loopback test scheme has been widely adopted. To assess the margin of the signal eye in the loopback configuration, the eye margin is purposely reduced by additional devices on the loopback path or using design for testability (DFT) features such as timing and voltage margining. Although the loopback test scheme successfully reduces the test cost by decoupling the dependency of external test equipment, it has robustness issues such as a fault masking issue and a non-ideality problem of margining circuits. The focus of this dissertation is to propose new methods to resolve the known issues in the loopback test mode. The fault masking issue in a loopback pair of analog to digital and digital to analog converters (ADC and DAC) which can be found in pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) signaling schemes is resolved using a proposed algorithm which separates the characteristics of the ADC and the DAC from a combined loopback response. The non-ideality problem of margining circuit is resolved using a proposed method which utilizes a random jitter injection technique. Using the injected random jitter, the jitter distribution is sampled by undersampling and margining, which provides the nonlinearity information using the proposed algorithm. Since the proposed method requires a random jitter source on the load board, an alternative solution is proposed which uses an intrinsic jitter profile and a sliding window search algorithm to characterize the nonlinearities. The sliding search algorithm was implemented in a low cost high volume manufacturing (HVM) tester to assess feasibility and validity of the proposed technique. The proposed methods are compatible with the existing loopback test scheme and require a minimal area and design overhead, hence they provide cost effective ways to enhance the robustness of the loopback test scheme. / text

Working collaboratively with VSA Texas, the research study examined how a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) curriculum functions for students with Autism Spectrum Disorder in an art learning setting. The curriculum focused on learning new media for art making in the form of digital film and video. My research and proposed successful classroom strategies are intended to assist current and future art educators in implementing aspects of UDL in their inclusive art classrooms to better educate students with disabilities through art. / text

Probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) provide the capability of evaluating uncertainty and variability of product use in addition to correlating the results with aspects of the usage context. Although energy consumption during use can cause a majority of a product's environmental impact, common practice is to neglect operational variability in life cycle inventories (LCIs). Therefore, the relationship between a product's usage context and its environmental performance is rarely considered in design evaluations. This dissertation demonstrates a method for describing the usage context as a set of factors and representing the usage context through a PGM. The application to LCIs is demonstrated through the use of a lightweight vehicle design example. Although replacing steel vehicle parts with aluminum parts reduces the weight and can increase fuel economy, the energy invested in production of aluminum parts is much larger than that of steel parts. The tradeoff between energy investment and fuel savings is highly dependent upon the vehicle fuel economy and lifetime mileage. The demonstration PGM is constructed from relating factors such as driver behavior, alternative driving schedules, and residential density with local conditional probability distributions derived from publicly available data sources. Unique scenarios are then assembled from sets of conditions on these factors to provide insight for sources of variance. The vehicle example demonstrated that implementation of realistic usage scenarios via a PGM can provide a much higher fidelity investigation of energy savings during use and that distinct scenarios can have significantly different implications for the effectiveness of lightweight vehicle designs. Scenarios with large families, for example, yield high energy savings, especially if the vehicle is used for commuting or stop-and-go traffic conditions. Scenarios of small families and efficient driving schedules yield lower energy savings for lightweight vehicle designs. / text

Design for Sustainable Behaviour (DfSB) is an emerging research area concerned with the application of design strategies to influence consumer behaviour during the use phase of a product towards more sustainable action. Current DfSB research has primarily focussed on strategy definition and selection, with little research into formalising a mature design process through which to design these behaviour changing interventions. Furthermore, understanding the actual sustainability and behavioural impact yielded through such investigations is limited in addition to the suitability and transferability of evaluation methods and results having seldom been discussed. This thesis investigated how DfSB models and strategies can be implemented within a structured design process towards a sustainable change in user behaviour. This was achieved by focussing a case study within the UK social housing sector with the aim of reducing domestic energy consumption through behaviour changing intervention, whilst maintaining occupant defined comfort levels. Following an in depth study of physical and behavioural control mechanisms as well as comfort and energy within the research context, a behaviour changing prototype was developed through an augmented user-centred design process, resulting in a physical manifestation of one specific DfSB strategy feedback; a user agentive performance indicator. In order to evaluate this feedback prototype, an evaluation framework was developed, targeted at the three fundamental questions that arise when faced with the evaluation of a DfSB strategy led intervention: (1) Did the produced design solution function for the specified context? (2) Has the user's behaviour changed as a consequence of the design intervention? (3) Is the change in user s behaviour sustainable? Applying these core questions in practice through focus groups and user trials resulted in an evaluation of unparalleled depth. The findings of this thesis illustrate the success of using this augmented design process and tripartite questioning strategy towards the design and evaluation of a DfSB strategy led intervention, building a vital knowledge platform for the formalisation of transferable DfSB theory, design and evaluation methods.