Sustainable Design Challenge

Sustainability

Making Process

Final Result

Reflection

At the beginning of this project, I thought that the green design principles would hinder our ability to create a good propeller car. I thought we would never be able to retrieve 80% or more of our materials back and still be able to make a car that could even move, let alone match the distance our unsustainable propeller car was able to traverse. I was wrong. Our sustainable design car not only matched the the first car we made, it traversed almost double the distance and it actually made it through the green doors at the end of the hallway. However, this increase in performance was not without a cost. The name sustainable design is actually a misnomer. Though we were able to save most of our materials, we wasted 10 times that in the research and development of the propeller car and it took us double the time. We had to be painstaking with our design. We had to hunt the fab lab for replacement parts that were sustainable. We had to find different ways of doing things. Though this may have been rewarding in the end, the result may not have been worth the effort.

Ib journal

Sustainable vs Conventional Design

Time Consumption

• We were able to finish our first prototype of the conventional design in 15-20 minutes. Our first sustainable prototype took almost an hour to create.
• The amount of time taken for trial and error for the sustainable design was probably triple of the trial and error time taken for the conventional design.
• The time taken just to think about ways to be more sustainable and finally trying to enact them took enormous amounts of time.

Resource Consumption

• Sustainable design, in the long run, will probably save many resources as 83% of resources are conserved in our car design.
• The research and development for the sustainable design squandered far more resources than for the creation of the conventional design.
• The sustainable design used more specialized resources that are normally used for other projects. This is more inefficient than using the materials that are already earmarked for the project.

Performance and Durability

• The sustainably designed car traveled twice the distance of the conventionally designed car.
• The sustainably designed car almost fell apart during testing and trials in the hallway
• The sustainable car is not nearly as durable as the conventional car design due to the prevention of certain materials and adhesives, including hot glue.