AI brings product sustainability to the forefront
Lifecycle analysis is a critical tool when designing any product. This is especially true when designing with sustainability in mind, as many of the design choices that go into the product influence its impact on the environment in some way. Such lifecycle analyses, however, typically happen at the end of the development cycle, despite the fact that much of a product’s sustainability impact is determined as early as design, forcing the development cycle to start over if results necessitate it. If companies want to design sustainable products in today’s competitive market, shifting these processes earlier in the product lifecycle would make a substantial difference.
How to achieve this is a major topic in an episode of The Industry Forward Podcast, with Eryn Devola, Head of Sustainability for Siemens Digital Industries, and Neil D’Souza, founder and CEO of Makersite as speakers. The two of them discuss the partnership between Makersite and Siemens as a demonstration of how artificial intelligence (AI) can help bring more insights into sustainable product design, enact lifecycle analysis earlier, and help companies scale beyond their initial goals.
A provider of insights
The biggest advantage that AI brings is its ability to ingest and leverage immense quantities of information. This information can then be used to enrich the information itself, providing users with new insights based on what the AI model ingested to provide them a way forward.
Consider what this means for the design of sustainable products. According to Neil, using the partnership between Makersite and Siemens as an example, AI can take the qualities from a product’s design choices, calculate things such as carbon footprint and impacts on the lifecycle, then return those calculations to the user. The users can then determine what decisions they need to make to increase sustainability, as well as other crucial factors such as manufacturability.
Additionally, the insights given improve with the accuracy of the information provided to the AI. The AI can factor in specific grades of steel, dimensions, components, and so much more. The more granular the information fed to the AI, the less surprises await engineers later on.
Shifting lifecycle analysis left
What this use of AI really provides is an additional “expert” trained on a company’s own data that gives engineers foresight into the design process and how choices made there will impact the product throughout its lifecycle. This is precisely what is needed to help lifecycle analysis “shift left” and happen earlier in the development cycle.
Typically, a sustainability team on a project might do two or three lifecycle analyses a year, waiting as the designers finalize their choices. With the data and insights provided by AI, however, that team can have the information they need for their analyses sooner. Already, Neil has seen companies use these strategies to shift their analyses upstream, early enough to enact further changes to design without sacrificing time and resources.
Piloting with scale in mind
That extra expertise provided by the AI additional benefit of helping companies scale up once they have achieved their early goals. As these types of tools and technologies become more easily accessible, the potential to bring their benefits to more aspects of the product lifecycle and in other areas also increases, letting companies do even more.
An example Eryn brings up is Haddy, a 3D-printing and additive manufacturing company committed to zero-waste furniture and a user of the tools provided by the Makersite-Siemens partnership. They do this by looking at the whole product lifecycle, using materials that are always reused, repaired or repurposed, never discarded, and to accomplish this, they have to understand what all of their products’ impacts are, what their second or third lives are going to look like from the beginning. Since then, they have achieved goals that were once thought possible for only big companies to accomplish.
The world needs more sustainable products now more than ever, and consumers are eager to buy them. If companies want to stay competitive, however, they need key insights into how impactful their products will be on the environment as soon as possible. Technologies like AI do just that, providing the information needed to shift lifecycle analyses earlier and enabling companies to make the best sustainable products on the market.
Be sure to visit The Industry Forward Podcast for more on sustainable product design.
Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.
