Sommar galenskapen

Alright, well my promise to keep this blog updated "as the summer progresses" was obviously a lie, since we are into full-blown autumn here, but I will try to catch you up on all that's happened. The summer travels were amazing, though by the end of it I certainly needed a vacation from all the vacationing, which came in the form of binge-working for the past two months.

I won't go into detail on each of the cities I'm about to list, so instead I'll put a one-word description of my experience or impression of each city in parentheses after its name. Some of these probably won't make sense to everyone reading, so feel free to ask if you want clarification on any of them. Anyway, right after Midsummer, my parents and sister came out to visit, and in the spirit of making the most of their Euro-trip we went on a cruise around the Baltic Sea. This was a nice way to see 8 different cities without having to change hotels every day. The weather was usually too cold and windy to be hanging out on the deck or at the pools of the floating resort, but that was okay because we were busy seeing Scandinavia all but two of the 11 days on board. The trip started and ended in Copenhagen (take-four) and along the way stopped in Oslo (rainy), Aarhus (Gammeldansk), Berlin (historical), Tallin (medieval), St. Petersburg ("democracy"), Helsinki (modern), and Stockholm (take-five). After the cruise, we took the train up to Gothenburg (sunny) and they spent a few days here before heading back. All-in-all, it was a really nice visit, and I was glad to finally be able to show my family where I've been living for the past year and a half.

A couple of days after they left, my friend Anna from Michigan came out to visit Europe for the first time. I met up with her in Rome (overrated), and then we flew to Krakow (underrated), took an overnight train to Bratislava (formerly-communist), made a day-trip to Vienna (beautiful), took a train to Prague (again), another train to Berlin (take-four), and then flew back to Gothenburg (beachy) to spend a couple of days. We then conveniently took the same flights back to Michigan as I started my summer U.S. trip, where I went to Ann Arbor (good-times), Baltimore (wedding-y), Atlanta (family-times), Portland (conference-y), and Atlanta again (reunion-y). This was an absolutely awesome trip - it was great to catch up with so many people from most of the major phases of my life, and I can't wait to see all of you (and those of you I missed) again soon.

So, I came back to Sweden, and then four days later left for another conference in Seoul (Hyundai-ful). This time, I was with 3 colleagues from here, and we spent three days before and three days after exploring the city, climbing a mountain, visiting the DMZ, and hanging out in a Buddhist temple. The day that I returned to Gothenburg another conference began, but this time it was local, and at the end of it I was finally done with my summer madness.

However, the following week classes began, and I was heavily involved in teaching and organizing a new course on design optimization. This was a really cool experience, although I underestimated how incredibly time-consuming it would be - between booking rooms, organizing the schedule and several guest speakers/lecturers, writing/planning lectures, creating assignments, designing and grading exams, and answering students' questions, I had very little time for any work outside of the course.  However, I think it was a really awesome experience, and now that I've done it once it should be easier to teach the same course in future years. Now that my teaching obligations are over for the moment, I'm able to spend my time working on the research papers that I've been neglecting ever since the start of summer...

Alright, well that's enough for now.  I've posted more pictures to the album to illustrate these adventures (link  on the left or here), and I'd love to hear what you're all up to!

Vi hörs,
Steven

Beginning of Year Två

The last few weeks have been full of beautiful weather, lots of work, a few work-related short trips, and some Swedish springtime holidays (new photos added to the link on the right of the page). I really don't remember the weather last spring/summer being this nice, and I think part of the reason is that last year I didn't participate in the long, cold, dark Swedish winter. This year, it feels absolutely glorious to have sunlight and temperatures right around 20C/70F, and on several occasions in the last month or so I've had picnics/barbecues outside (which is apparently a very Swedish thing to do when the sun is shining). In terms of my work, I have been working hard to write and finalize a few conference papers (which are sending me to the US in August, South Korea in August, and hopefully the US again in November) and a couple of journal papers, as well as developing a course that I will be co-teaching in the fall. I also for the second time ran Göteborgsvarvet, the annual Gothenburg half-marathon which is apparently the largest (participation-wise, not length-wise) half-marathon in the world, which was somewhat painful, but still rewarding.

In the middle of May, I went with a bunch of people in my department to a research-related trip/meeting in Prague. While almost everyone flew there, four of us decided to rent a car and drive down to Prague, which is about 13 hours if done non-stop and closer to 18-20 if you're not in a hurry like us. We left on a Saturday evening right after I finished Göteborgsvarvet, stopped in Malmö (Sweden) for dinner at a famous falafel place, drove across the bridge to Denmark, took a ferry to Germany, and spent the night in Lübeck (Germany). We then finished the drive on Sunday, stopping for an unnecessarily-long three-hour detour in Berlin for a currywurst lunch and arriving in Prague in the evening. The road trip gave me a nice opportunity to see the European countryside and take a few stops along the way. On the way down, one of the guys in the car decided we should play a game where we go around in a circle and name famous Czech people until we can't name any more. It was then that I realized how totally unknowledgeable about the Czech Republic I was, as I couldn't think of a single person. (If any of you find yourselves in this situation in the future, Franz Kafka was Czech.) Anyway, once we got to Prague, there was a program arranged for us, and we as a group of about 60 researchers toured Skoda (a Czech car company); drank, ate, and toured a brewery; toured a sewage treatment plant; took a river-dinner cruise, and went on a walking tour of the city. We went out in the evenings to experience Czech life, which mostly involved drinking the local beer (Czechs are the highest per-capita consumers of beer in the world, by a lot). Prague is a beautiful old European city, but to me it seems a bit too touristy and lacks some of the charm of other cities I've been to. After three days in Prague, we drove all the way back to Sweden in a single day, making only a couple of stops for food in Germany and Denmark.

Yesterday was Midsummer's Eve here in Sweden, which is basically tied with Christmas for being the biggest holiday in Sweden. It always falls on a Friday, and this year it happened to be my birthday, so it was a double celebration. This typically involves eating copious amounts of food (a smörgåsbord), drinking snaps, and going to a park to dance around a big, leafy pole (for more details on the holiday, check this video out). So, yesterday that's pretty much what I did with a few friends. This day also marks the beginning of what I call "vacation season", because from now through the middle of August, pretty much everybody goes on vacation. Last year I didn't know that, and I was one of the only people in the office, but this year I will be observing it fully and taking advantage of my five-weeks' vacation (hooray working in Sweden!). So, I will have more to report on some fun travels as the summer progresses.

Ha en bra sommar!
Steven

Ettårsdagen

One year ago today, I stepped off an airplane to begin a new chapter of my life in Sweden. I cannot believe how quickly this first year has gone by, but so far it has been an incredible experience that has truly broadened my perspectives. Of course, the question that is slowly becoming more important is: What's next? Although my current contract only has one year left on it, there seems to be a strong possibility that I could extend it.

This is something that I've been thinking a lot about lately - whether I should stay here or head back to the good ol' U. S. of A. Both hold amazing opportunities, and I'm really not sure of where I want to be. So, I thought I'd write a relatively short post today reflecting on the things that I like about living in Sweden vs. those that I like about living in America*. Consider this a brief "pros and pros" list:

Sweden: Great job (my own office with a view, flexible working hours, travel opportunities, awesome colleagues, self-led work). Opportunities to travel Europe. Five weeks vacation, which extends to six when I turn 30. Free healthcare. Free education. Strong economy. Public transportation. Fika.

America: Hamburgers. Opportunities to easily travel to see friends and family. English-speaking. Alcohol prices. Everything prices. American sports. Lower taxes & higher wages. Climate (most parts). Chipotle. Housing/space. Trader Joe's. Liberty.

So, where will I be a year from now? I'll let you know when I figure it out myself...

Happy May Day,
Steven

*whenever I hear James Brown's "Living in America", this seems like a no-brainer

Berlin and Singapore

What do Berlin and Singapore have in common? Not much, besides the fact that I recently traveled to both. I went to Berlin a couple of weeks ago for a workshop and conference on survey methods, and I spent the following week in Singapore for a conference on Life Cycle Engineering, where I presented some of my work.

We will go chronologically and start with Berlin. While I've been to Germany a couple of times, including my 3-week study abroad program in Kassel during college and last month's dalliance in the North Rhine-Westphalia region (see my last post), I had never been to the capital city. After spending four days there, I must say that this is one of my favorite European cities. There is so much recent history, with Napoleon, World War I, Nazi rule, World War II, the Cold War, and the relatively recent reunification and modernization of East Berlin, each of which left its mark on the city. I went with one of my colleagues, and we arrived about a half-day early so that we could see a little bit of the city. Our plane landed at noon, and at 1pm we had checked into our hotel and were starting a 3.5-hour walking tour around the center of the city. I was amazed at how much there was to see and hear about in such a small area - we saw the Reichstag (Parliament building), the Brandenburg Gate (which was constructed in the 1700s), a large memorial to the murdered Jews in Europe during WWII (built just a few years ago), the place where Hitler shot himself (now a parking lot), the former headquarters of the Luftwaffe, one of the few remaining pieces of the Berlin Wall, the site of the old Gestapo and SS headquarters buildings, Checkpoint Charlie, the city concert hall, Bebelplatz (where the famous Nazi book burning took place), and Museum Island (where 4 or 5 museums are located - on an island). I could have easily spent a week in Berlin to look through the museums and explore all of the other parts of town, but I guess that will have to wait for another visit. We met up with a friend of my colleague the first two nights, and the third night we had a conference dinner at a rotating restaurant on the top of the TV tower, which gave us a really nice view of the city. Oh, and we drank beer every night, as one feels obliged to do in Germany. For some reason that I may never comprehend, beer always tastes better there.

Upon returning from Berlin, I had 30 hours in Gothenburg before departing to Singapore. Unlike Sweden and Germany, Singapore's primary language is English. While this might not be evident from communicating with some of the cab drivers, in general I felt less out-of-place approaching people and speaking English than I do in Sweden or Germany. Singapore is quite a diverse city, with many of the people having Chinese origins, the culture bearing strong British influences, and about a third of the population having moved there for work. The city is very clean and safe, and the architecture is strikingly modern and beautiful. Aside from the conference, I had an extra day on each end to sightsee, so I did a lot of walking around the city and taking pictures (see the album link to the right). At the conference, I met a lot of people, nearly all of whom were European, as well as an American guy who is also living in Sweden and working at Chalmers. The first night of the conference, a group of us went out for dinner and drinks, and I counted that five out of six of us were living in a different country than our homelands: We had two Americans living in Sweden, a Brazilian living in France, a French person living in England, an a Finn living in the US. And we all had to go halfway around the world to Singapore to meet. The ironic thing was that this was a conference focusing on sustainability, and few people mentioned the fact that over a hundred westerners took highly carbon dioxide-emitting flights to Singapore to talk about reducing carbon emissions and other sustainability issues. While there were some moments of guilt about this, it was still a very cool experience, and hopefully we all learned some things that will more than compensate for the ill environmental effects of the trip.

After the conference ended on Friday night, a few of us decided to check out the famous "Night Safari", which is basically a zoo centered around nocturnal animals that is open after dark. By the time we were ready to go, our group had grown to nine people, and so we took a large van-taxi there. Upon arrival, we immediately and unintentionally lost half of the group, so we were split into a group of 4 and a group of 5. Unfortunately, we had not anticipated this and had no meeting plan, it was crowded and dark, and since we were foreigners, most of our group members were not using cell phones (nor had we exchanged numbers). So, the four of us walked around the zoo, saw the animals, took a tram ride, and saw a couple of shows, all the while searching and yelling out for our friends to try and find them. We started to make up stories about how they had gotten eaten by the lions, tigers, and hippos at the zoo, and I even asked some of the staff if any Europeans had been eaten that night. They told us "no", but we figured that they just didn't want to scare us. Finally, about three hours after we arrived at the zoo, just after we had given up on any chance of them still being alive, I got a call on my cell phone (I had given my business card to some of the others) - they were alive, well, and waiting for us at the entrance! It was a miraculous reunion, and we all went out for drinks afterward to celebrate life.

One more fun fact: Singapore is the farthest south I have ever been in my life, being just 85 miles north of the equator. My recent trips to Norway took me the farthest north I have ever been, being about 350 miles south of the arctic circle. I am truly broadening my scope of world travels this year!

In all, these were two amazing trips to very cool places that I hope all of you have a chance to see at some point in your lives. Just watch out for the man-eating hippos at the Night Safari.

Until next time,
Steven

Brighter weather and travels

Spring is springing, work is chugging along, and my travels are beginning to escalate as we head into my second summer living in Gothenburg. I have to say "living" in Gothenburg, because it seems like I won't be spending a whole lot of time here during the summer with all of my vacation and conference plans, but hopefully there will still be opportunities to enjoy the city, the weather, and the coast during the nicest part of the year here.

Today we have about 13 hours of sunlight, which is truly a glorious feeling after the nadir of 5-ish hours per day in the peak of winter. Temperatures seem to be hitting the positive numbers on the celsius scale on a daily basis, and it almost feels like I should be going outside in a t-shirt (until I remember that I tried that and it is still way too cold for such attire). Anyway, I've taken a couple of short trips since my last post, so I thought I'd make some short written accounts for posterity and whatnot. Photos have been added to the album from the last post.

A few weeks ago, I went to my first conference that involved presenting my work from Sweden (see the 3 January post), which was located in Bochum, Germany.  Where?  Bochum.  It's a relatively small college-y town in the industrial area of western Germany, near Essen and not far from Cologne and Dusseldorf. Since I had heard more of the latter two cities, I decided to spend a day in each to explore. The first stop was Cologne (Köln for all you Deutschlanders out there), which I visited for 7-ish hours on my way from the Frankfurt airport to Bochum. The main attraction there is a giant cathedral, which is quite impressive and apparently took about 630 years to build. If you think about the history of the U.S., 630 years is more than two and a half of that. From there, I went by train to Bochum, where I stayed and conferenced for three and a half days. Three of my colleagues from Chalmers were also there for different parts of the conference (two came for the first two days and a third came for the last two days), and I presented my paper on Wednesday, which I think went well. Bochum was actually a really nice town, with some cool areas for shopping and going out to eat and drink, and we went out one of the nights with some people from the conference. The conference and accompanying activities occupied the majority of the time there - the first night we went to a design museum in Essen, the second night to a mining museum in Bochum, and the third on a city tour of Dusseldorf. The day after the conference, I spent some hours in Dusseldorf touring around before flying back to Gothenburg. Apparently Dusseldorf and Cologne have somewhat of a city-sibling rivalry going on, which is interesting - both are located on the Rheine river and are centers for fashion, art, shopping, and Karnival celebrations, but they have different beer specialties (Kölsch in Cologne and Alt in Dusseldorf), rival football teams, and they sort of compete as the cultural center of the North Rhine-Westphalia state. Both had a street called Hohe Straße (High Street, for my former roomies back in Ann Arbor), which made me feel somewhat at home, so I'm not going to pick sides here.

My second recent trip was back to Norway for another ski weekend - this time for cross-country skiing. I had never done this before, but it was surprisingly not too difficult and rather enjoyable. This was with the same group that I went to Hafjell with (see the 25 February post), but this time we went to someplace in the middle-of-nowhere Norway rather than a resort mountain. Literally, the directions we were given for the drive from Oslo was something like "take this road until you are no longer in civilization, and then turn left three times". We actually thought we were out of "civilization" about an hour prior to what the direction-provider intended, but we eventually figured it out somehow and made it to the cabin. The cabin belonged to one of the girls in the group, and it didn't have electricity or running water, so we had to keep the fire going for heat (it got down to around -20 C at night) and fill some tanks with water from a pump every morning for all of the water-requiring activities. On Saturday we took a ski trip through the beautiful, snowy landscape, the destination of which was the top of a hill with a nice overlook. On the way back, we stopped and made a fire in the snow (didn't know that could be done) and cooked hot dogs for lunch. On Sunday before we left the cabin, we shoveled about a meter's worth of snow off the roof, which took the eight of us about 2 hours to complete. That was a LOT of snow, but fortunately the sun was shining and it was a beautiful day, and at the end we got to jump off the roof into all the snow we had dumped on the ground. Afterward, we made our way back to civilization and home.

I have a new batch of traveling coming up, which will take me to Berlin for a workshop in a little over a week, followed immediately by a week in Singapore for a conference, and then I'll have a couple of months in Gothenburg before midsummer and the next whirlwind of voyages. I'm looking forward to it all, and I'll do my best to keep the blog updated!

Glad påsk (Happy Easter)!
Steven

A Norwegian ski-venture

A few weekends ago I went with a friend on a ski trip to Norway. His Norwegian girlfriend and a bunch of her friends had a cabin for the weekend at Hafjell, a ski resort a few hours north of Oslo, and they had an extra spot for me to tag along. I later found out that Hafjell is right outside of Lillehammer and was one of the mountains used in the Winter Olympics back in '94, so it was actually a really nice resort/mountain. Anyway, I took a bus up to Oslo and then we took a car (farther) up to Hafjell to spend Friday through Sunday in the mountains.

Now, I'm not much of a skier. I went for the first time with my family when I was in high school, and then my second ski experience was five years later in Michigan. A couple of years ago I also learned how to snowboard in Michigan, but that's quite a different type of balance and skill. Now, another five years since my last time on skis, I wanted to give skiing another shot. While I fully expected to be a disaster around a group of seasoned Norwegians (someone in Gothenburg had told me that people in Norway are basically "born on skis"), it actually went pretty well, and I was able to handle all of the blue slopes we tried with only one soft fall at the end of the first day. So, we skied most of Friday and Saturday, and we hung out in the cabin with my new Norwegian friends in the evenings.

One cool thing that the resort held on Saturday afternoon was an "afterski" party at a lodge/bar/restaurant near the top of the mountain. This was basically a giant, sweaty mess of people who had been skiing all day gathering indoors, drinking, and dancing in a club-like atmosphere. I'm not sure if they have this at American ski resorts, but if not, they should - it was really fun.

A few thoughts on Norway, as this was my first time there (and I believe it's the farthest north I've ever been!). From what I saw, it is absolutely beautiful in the winter. Both the drive there and the views from the top of the mountain were breathtaking. I didn't really get a good look at a fjord (I was only in Oslo when it was dark out), but we drove around the largest lake in Norway, Mjøsa, which was an amazing scene. Another thing about Norway is that things are very expensive, but I was expecting this - from what I had heard from others, things in Norway are twice the price of things in Sweden (where prices are already ridiculous by American standards). Maybe it was because I was prepared and because I didn't buy very much, but I didn't think it was quite that bad. Okay, so a cheap beer at the afterski was the equivalent of about $14, but at an expensive place in Gothenburg it could be $11 or so. Other stuff that I saw at grocery stores and convenience stores only seemed a bit more expensive than it would be in Sweden.

Regarding the language, Norwegian is very similar to Swedish, with a few notable differences that I caught in my three days there. First, when they want to show appreciation, instead of the Swedish "tack så mycket" (thanks so much), they say "tusen takk" (a thousand thanks). Also, they pronounce the word for "no" differently - in Swedish we say "nej" (pronounced "nay"), but they say "nei" (pronounced "nigh"). Also, they have different vowels - the Swedes have the same vowels as in English plus the additional vowels å, ä, and ö, which the Norwegians replace with å, æ, and ø. Lastly, I noticed that a lot of words that in Swedish start with a "v" are spelled in Norwegian with an "hv", but pronounced pretty much the same. I'm sure there are many other differences, but that's all I noticed with my limited Swedish skills in my limited time in Norway.

All in all, I have a fairly favorable opinion of Norway - Sweden's happy, oil-rich, silly neighbor to the north. I guess it's kind of like Canada is to the U.S., eh?

Tusen takk for reading!
Steven

Oh, and here's some pictures and the foundation for my 2013 running album:
https://plus.google.com/photos/115872916923607849736/albums/5848636155282993857?authkey=CNa0m8etr8_gWA

What's missing?

Since I moved here, people have asked me whether I "miss" home. In some ways, I don't consider moving here to be all that different from when I moved to Maryland or to Michigan for the first time. It's a new place, it's cold, and I didn't really know anybody here before arriving. The hardest part about moving to a new place is saying goodbye to family and friends in the previous place, and this time I've actually added a lot of distance and expense to being able to go back and see people. Phone calls and email work exactly the same as they did before (aside from the time difference), so being away from "home" isn't so intimidating.

But what non-person things do I miss from the United States of America? I think a post on this can give you some ideas about the main differences I see between living in the US and living in Sweden.

First, let's talk about food. Swedish food is good, but it's not really anything new, exciting, or exotic. Swedes eat a lot of fish, which I like, and a lot of potatoes, which I'm not crazy about but will eat if they're on my plate. Swedish meatballs are really not all that common, and I can get the same meatballs at IKEA here as I could get at IKEA back in the US. In terms of fast food/restaurants, the only American chains in Gothenburg are McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Subway, and Hard Rock Cafe, and I pretty much never go to those. Among the local fare, there are a lot of good Thai restaurants and decent pizzerias around, and then there are lots of other ethnically-themed restaurants that tend toward the more expensive side. We have a serious dearth of Mexican/southwestern cuisine (I could go for a Chipotle burrito right now), and it's difficult/expensive to find a decent burger (e.g., no Five Guys).

Another food-related difference can be found in the grocery stores. The ones I've been to here just don't have the selection that the American ones have, nor do they have brands that I was familiar with before. One thing that I always thought was amazing in the US was that if I found a recipe that called for some specific size of a specific product, the store would have it. Like, say, a 14.5-ounce can of stewed tomatoes with mexican green chilis. I'd see that on the recipe's list of ingredients and be like, "what are the odds that they have tomatoes in that style with that particular spicy accompaniment in a can of that size?", and then it's just there on the shelf at Kroger. Well, here, they don't know what an ounce is, and they don't have the same varieties of products. Unfortunately, that rules out most of the American recipes I can find on the internet, meaning I have to get creative if I want to cook (which is not necessarily a bad thing).

And it's not just food products that are different - I'm having to get used to new brands of other things, like shampoo and deodorant and laundry detergent. Even the deodorant product itself comes in a differently-shaped container with a weird applicator. Recently, I noticed that Unilever and Proctor and Gamble make a lot of the name-brand products here (both food and non-food), which probably means that they are the same or similar products as their American counterparts. Unfortunately, I never paid attention to the company before (did you know that Tide detergent is made by P&G?), so it's still all new to me - after nearly 9 months here, I still have no idea what I want when I'm shopping.

The next thing that I miss is not so much a thing as it is an atmosphere. While everyone speaks great English and my Swedish is improving, I miss not knowing the language that everyone around me is usually speaking. That's not (necessarily) to say that I want to eavesdrop on conversations around me, but it's just a different feeling to be walking around and not knowing what people are saying.

Finally, watching American sports is a lot tougher to do over here. As you can probably guess, people here don't care about baseball, basketball, or American football. During NFL season, one of the Swedish channels shows an average of one game per Sunday, and they cover up the audio with their own Swedish commentators. I've never actually tried to listen to it, but from what I've been told, these commentators don't know very much about American football. There are a couple of sports bars in town that show those NFL games (including the Super Bowl, which starts at midnight here!), but the selection at one game per week is severely limited. Other sports, like baseball, college football, and college basketball, are never on TV here, so they require some fancy internet work and are difficult if not impossible to find in high quality. This could probably be fixed by setting up a slingbox or ordering some super-fancy-special cable package (I think ESPN is obtainable, but I've never actually checked), but who has time for that?

I think I can sum this all up and say that the things I miss deal with familiarity. Familiar people, familiar products, familiar language, familiar sports. I think that if I stay here long enough I'll know lots of people, have a good idea of what Swedish products I like and dislike, be fluent enough in the language, and (ugh) start liking soccer and calling it "football".

We'll see about that last one...

Steven

About my work

I always have a hard time when somebody asks me what I do, particularly when it's someone that I don't know. I suppose my response depends on what I know about the person I'm speaking with. If I know that person works at a university, I say, "I'm a postdoc". If that person doesn't work in academia or I'm not sure, I say, "I do research". If it's somebody in Gothenburg, I'll say, "I work at Chalmers" or "I do research at Chalmers" (Chalmers is the name of the university). Unfortunately, the latter two responses often include a follow-up question like, "so, you're a Ph.D. student?" And then I have to say, "no, I just do research". For the casual conversation/acquaintance, this is often enough, but a lot of times people delve deeper with the bigger question: "So, what do you research?" Again, I can try to cop out and say that I'm in mechanical engineering, or more specifically, I work in a department called "Product and Production Development", but a lot of people seem to expect more details. This post is dedicated to answering all of your burning questions about what I do and why I moved to Sweden to do it.

My research looks into variation in product design and manufacturing and how it affects important product development goals like sustainability. That's the best one-sentence description I can come up with right now, so you can stop there if you're bored (or not bored enough), or you can keep reading for more exciting details about what all of that means.

Sustainability is a hot word these days (in fact, the growth in the use of the word is itself unsustainable: http://xkcd.com/1007/), and everybody seems to be trying to get into research and businesses that can tout sustainability. It sounds good, it's "green", it's good for the planet, and, in some cases, it sells. Today, governments care about sustainability, so they fund research projects, customers care about sustainability, so they buy things that they think are good for the planet, and hippies care about sustainability, so they hug trees and don't shower. But, what is sustainability? Most people usually think about the environment and how our actions are causing global warming or destroying the ozone layer or killing the polar bears. Some academic circles have adopted an idea called "triple sustainability", which involves three types of sustainability: People, planet, and profits. In other words, there is social sustainability, ecological sustainability, and economic sustainability. The truth is, developing a business around the first two types without caring about economics means that your business will fail before it can have a lasting impact on social and environmental goals. Social is the hardest one to define and measure, since it deals with things like community programs, health and safety of workers and customers, and human rights. This one is kind of on the back burner for my research right now, so I'm mostly looking at economic and ecological sustainability. This means I care about how design decisions affect manufacturing costs and revenues (economic) and the impact on the environment through resource consumption, emissions, and waste (ecological). One of my big questions is to find out what tradeoff exists between these two objectives. In other words, how many dollars/euros/kronor does it cost to reduce one pound of carbon dioxide emissions or some other environmental measure?

Now, back to this idea about variation in product design and manufacturing. In case you didn't know, no two items are ever exactly alike. The internet says that an iPhone 5 is 4.87 inches long, but if you measure the length of one iPhone 5, it may be 4.8701 inches, while a second iPhone 5 may be 4.8697 inches long (note: I have no idea what the actual tolerances are for iPhone parts, but I'm just using these numbers for the sake of argument). Chances are, you're either thinking: "Who cares?", or "That's ridiculous that a $900 device isn't built with higher precision!". I agree with both of you, and the question is really about where you draw the line. You could increase the precision and make it fit between 4.869999 and 4.870001 inches, or you could reduce the precision and make it fit between 4.8 and 4.9 inches long. The problem occurs when the difference is noticeable. It is especially important when you have a bunch of parts that have to fit together - if you noticed that the front cover of your phone is too wide and sticks out in relation to the back part, you probably won't be very happy with the appearance and feel of your phone. Even more problematic is when it affects the functionality of your phone; if the wiring inside isn't precise enough and something becomes disconnected, then you have some serious problems, angry customers, and phones being thrown away and going into landfills. Why don't we just make things with the highest precision possible? Because the more precise it is designed to be, the more expensive it is to make. So, designers have to balance how much variation they can tolerate with the costs.

So what exactly am I doing about this? My research group at Chalmers is involved in analyzing how to design products while taking this type of variation into account. We have developed software that can analyze how variation in a part (like the length of a wire) affects variation in an assembly (like the way two wires fit together for soldering) and how all of that variation might affect functionality (like does the phone/robot/car work?). My part in this is to bring in sustainability outcomes and look into how design decisions affect things like economic, ecological, and social objectives. I use models and simulations to predict how a decision like the tolerance of a dimension (the amount of variation the designer says is tolerable in the manufactured product, for instance, "within 1 millimeter of the designed length") or the material chosen will affect things like economic, ecological, and social objectives.

Finally, the big question: Why do we really care? Well, for one, I'd like to know how the three types of sustainability trade off when it comes to certain design decisions. I can choose to allow more variation in a part to reduce the cost by a dollar (economic sustainability), but that might raise the social or ecological costs. When a designer makes these decisions, they probably want to optimize for some objective, which is usually economic, but if they add in some amount of ecological or social criteria, the optimal design will change. Obviously, from a society standpoint, we want companies to value environmental and social goals, so how do we do that? There are two ways that I'm currently looking into. The first is letting the customers choose, which requires that they have complete information about the sustainability repercussions of every product on the market. One challenge there is in governments or industries mandating that this information is standardized, accurate, and available (imagine every item in the store having some "greenness" score right next to the price tag), but that probably can't happen until we prove that it's important. For one study, I ran a survey to find out how people value a product's price, environmental friendliness, and appearance of quality for a hypothetical smart phone, which shows us how people trade these things off when they buy something (or how they say that they trade them off). With all of the craze for eco-friendly or "green" products, along with the outrage over the worker health and safety scandals with things like child sweatshops and fires in textile factories, the market could give producers financial incentives to improve all three sustainability goals. The second way is to raise taxes for environmental and social impacts (like a gasoline tax), so another study I'm working on is to show how different types of legislation would force social and environmental impacts to become economic motivation. This could result in some meaningful recommendations for how governments can promote triple sustainability and how designers can optimize their products.

Is this the same kind of thing I did at Michigan? Sort of. At Michigan, I also looked at design optimization and tradeoffs using computer simulations, but that work dealt specifically with car and military vehicle safety rather than sustainability. There, I also looked at how customer demand and government intervention can influence the way companies design their vehicles. So, why did I move to Sweden to do this? First: "Why not?" Second, I wanted to apply my modeling and optimization and tradeoff analysis techniques to more general product design, which is an opportunity that my department at Chalmers could afford me. My current position also is entirely funded by the Swedish government, which means that I'm free to work on any research topic or product that I'd like to (i.e., I'm not restricted to working on any specific product or any specific research question). Some day, I'd like to influence the design of products either by designing them myself or helping policy makers develop laws, regulations, and guidelines that will positively impact how companies design things. Hopefully this can result in more environmentally and socially sustainable behavior by people, effectively saving the world from all of its problems.

Until then, I'll keep living the dream in Sweden.

Happy New Year!
Steven