I’m a couple of days away from swapping my MacBook for a real book or two and disappearing on a couple of week’s holiday, so I’m rather quickly bashing through everything on my to-do list, arranging some content for the next few issues and avoiding phone calls from Greg wondering “Where the **** is the copy for page 4?” – all at the same time as winding down for some countryside peace and quiet.
While I’m off there’s a couple of things that I’m going to miss (in terms of logistics). SIGGRAPH is on soon and looks interesting although I’ve never been – something always comes out of that with serious application to our field of coverage – and it would have been worth attending just to watch the bun-fight between the Luxion and Bunkspeed guys.
The other is an online workshop (I can’t use the word “webinar” in any seriousness) being held by the folks at Sustainable Minds on the 27th of July. If you’re not aware of the company and its online offering, then its worth a look if you have any interest in sustainable design, in green design, in ecodesign (insert over used cliche here at will). We took a look at version 1.1 of the service a couple of months ago, but this are progressing nicely with 1.3 adding some much needed unit flexibility.
If you’re not familiar with Sustainable Minds, in short, it allows you to discover the environmental impact of not only your products design and manufacture, but also its transportation, usage and end of life treatment. There’s a range of tools there for comparing design concepts and integrating it with your design tools. All in all, the workshop is worth a look if you’re interested in the field and more specifically, if you’re looking for some decent data to add into your design and business decisions.
An example of Sustainable Minds’ LCA design variant analysis reporting tools
The workshop is 60 minutes and covers the business case for using Sustainable Minds in product development, an overview of ecodesign strategies and life cycle assessment (LCA), Who, when and how to use Sustainable Minds LCA Software and an interactive question and answer session.
If any of you do “attend”, then I’d love to know what you think about it and what you learned. Perhaps drop us a comment when it’s over if you make it along.
Update: Terry Swack, CEO of Sustainable Minds just let me know that the workshop will run every week, on the same day, at the same time for a while, so I’ll jump on it when I get back.
