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