Artificial Intelligence and Sustainable Design
Papers from the 2011 AAAI Spring Symposium
Douglas Fisher and Mary Lou Maher Program Cochairs
Technical Report SS-11-02
122 pp., $30.00
ISBN 978-1-57735-494-9
[Add to Cart] [View Cart]
Design for X has become a way of changing design thinking so that downstream concerns are considered early in the design process. Imperatives for environmental and societal sustainability are challenging designers to think beyond Design for X and more broadly to consider factors that had been previously given little attention. Life cycle costs should be considered along many dimensions; including energy requirements during manufacture and use phases, and material loss and environmental damage at the end of a product’s life. In fact, a long-term vision for the field of AI and sustainable design is cradle-to-cradle design, so that products are not designed to be thrown away or recycled in very limited ways, but products are designed and built that enable full reuse, with nothing thrown out and nothing degraded.
The increased complexity of design necessitated by a desire for very long-term planet sustainability requires application of and advances in artificial intelligence. AI and design is established already, with conferences and journals. The purpose of this symposium is to bring together people that have experience in AI in design or computational sustainability to focus on the challenges of sustainable design and the role that AI plays in achieving sustainability.