Sustainable Minds, a greener product design software and information services company, today announced the general release of Sustainable Minds 1.0, a comprehensive SaaS software and information service that enables companies to create more environmentally sustainable products. It integrates on-demand, Web-based software with educational content enabling users to apply ecodesign strategies to generate innovative and greener product concepts, and use life cycle assessment (LCA) to measure the potential environmental and human health impacts of the concepts. This delivers quantified performance metrics to facilitate design decisions that support greener products.
It is designed for product designers, mechanical engineers, product managers, marketers and sustainability leads in manufacturing companies and consultancies, as well as educational institutions teaching product design, engineering and/or sustainable business.
"Sustainable Minds is leading the way in helping product designers understand and apply environmentally sustainable practices throughout the product design process," stated Jeff Salazar, Design Director, LUNAR. "This system is helping us achieve our mission to generate thoughtful product solutions that are not only engaging and beautiful, but just as importantly, consider their overall environmental impact in a meaningful way. Sustainable Minds is an indispensable tool that allows our design teams access to more valid and concrete information for critical decision making early in the design process."
"Sustainable Minds enables product development teams to operationalize greener product design processes, improve cycle time, and win new business with truly greener products," stated Terry Swack, Co-founder and CEO of Sustainable Minds, LLC. "Organizations can gain fast access to sustainability knowledge, which reduces the time and effort associated with training and acquiring ecodesign and LCA information from multiple, fragmented sources. The software provides real time analyses that allow users to make informed trade-offs between standard product design criteria such as performance, cost, and aesthetics, with environmental impact - well before product design is complete, and before changes are costly or impossible to make. Sustainable Minds release 1.0 will catalyze the way products are designed and made by helping to bring products to market with improved environmental performance. Organizations that figure this out now will certainly have a greater competitive advantage."
Comprehensive System
Sustainable Minds integrates three components in one system:
1. Life Cycle Assessment: Easy to use software enables rapid iteration and evaluation of product concepts - in a standardized and consistent way - in the earliest stages of design. It provides an alternative to full-scale LCA offerings that are costly, complex, time-consuming and difficult to use for evolving product concepts. Sustainable Minds LCA requires no LCA training or expertise. It produces compelling, graphic output for fast interpretation and communication.
2. Learning Center: A content-rich environment that provides information on environmental sustainability design practices (ecodesign) and LCA, in-context while users work on projects.
3. Community: A place to learn from, and connect with, professionals in manufacturing, consulting and education who are working to design greener products.
Works with or without CAD or PLM Tools
Sustainable Minds is optimized for electro-mechanical products: household appliances, housewares, consumer electronics, industrial and commercial equipment, and outdoor and sporting equipment.
It is used to benchmark existing products, and then in all stages of concept design, from screening possible directions to explore, through comparing final design concepts. Free-standing software, not a plug-in, it can be used to assess the impacts from an existing product or a new product, before and while using CAD tools. It interoperates with any CAD or PLM system for easy import of bill of material (BOM) data - and is streamlined for BOM data import from Autodesk Inventor.
Unlike other new LCA software, Sustainable Minds can assess an entire product system, assemblies, sub-assemblies and parts. It models impacts in all life cycle stages: manufacturing (materials/processes), use, end of life and transportation. The standardized LCA process ensures ease of comparability of competing concepts, as well as different products.
Extensive reporting capabilities make it easy to understand impacts from an existing or reference product, to then generate new product concepts that improve environmental performance.
The integrated Learning Center educates designers about ecodesign and life cycle assessment strategy, practice and methods. For those new to LCA, knowledge is delivered in-context, removing the need for up-front training or course work. LCA professionals can help design teams set up new projects based on full-scale LCA results, making the results more actionable and enabling them to provide expertise throughout the design process.