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- Creators: Arizona State University
- Creators: Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts
Description
Drought is one of the most pressing issues affecting the future of the standard of living here in Phoenix. With the threat of water rationing and steep price hikes looming on the horizon for water customers in California, the desert southwest, and in drought-stricken communities worldwide, industrial designers are in a prime position to help improve the experience of water conservation so that consumers are willing to start taking conscious steps toward rethinking their relationship with water usage.
In a research group, several designers sought to understand the depth and complexity of this highly politicized issue by interviewing a wide variety of stakeholders, including sustainability experts, landscapers, water company executives, small business owners, reservoir forest rangers, and many more. Data synthesis led to the conclusion that residential water use is a lifestyle issue, and the only real way to conserve involves a significant shift in the collective idea of an “ideal” home—lawns, pools, and overwatered landscaping contribute to 70% of all water use by residences in the Phoenix area. The only real way to conserve involves increasing population density and creating communal green spaces.
DR. DISH is a dishwashing device that is meant to fit into the high-density living spaces that are rapidly being built in the face of the massive exodus of people into the world’s cities. To help busy apartment and condominium dwellers conserve water and time, DR. DISH converts a standard kitchen sink into a small dishwasher, which uses significantly less water than hand-washing dishes or rinsing dishes before putting them into a conventional dishwasher. Using advanced filtration technology and a powerful rinse cycle, a load dishes can be cleaned with about 2 gallons of water. Fully automating the dishwashing process also saves the user time and minimizes unpleasant contact with food residue and grease.
This device is meant to have a significant impact upon the water use of households that do not have a dishwasher, or simply do not use their dishwasher. With a low target price point and myriad convenient features, DR. DISH is a high-tech solution that promises water savings at a time when every effort toward conservation is absolutely critical. As we move toward a new era in determining water rights and imposing mandatory restrictions upon each and every person living in affected areas, creating conservation solutions that will be relevant for the lifestyles of the future is especially important, and the agility of designers in coming up with products that quickly cut consumer water consumption will be a key factor in determining whether humanity will be able to adapt to a new era in our relationship with natural resources.
In a research group, several designers sought to understand the depth and complexity of this highly politicized issue by interviewing a wide variety of stakeholders, including sustainability experts, landscapers, water company executives, small business owners, reservoir forest rangers, and many more. Data synthesis led to the conclusion that residential water use is a lifestyle issue, and the only real way to conserve involves a significant shift in the collective idea of an “ideal” home—lawns, pools, and overwatered landscaping contribute to 70% of all water use by residences in the Phoenix area. The only real way to conserve involves increasing population density and creating communal green spaces.
DR. DISH is a dishwashing device that is meant to fit into the high-density living spaces that are rapidly being built in the face of the massive exodus of people into the world’s cities. To help busy apartment and condominium dwellers conserve water and time, DR. DISH converts a standard kitchen sink into a small dishwasher, which uses significantly less water than hand-washing dishes or rinsing dishes before putting them into a conventional dishwasher. Using advanced filtration technology and a powerful rinse cycle, a load dishes can be cleaned with about 2 gallons of water. Fully automating the dishwashing process also saves the user time and minimizes unpleasant contact with food residue and grease.
This device is meant to have a significant impact upon the water use of households that do not have a dishwasher, or simply do not use their dishwasher. With a low target price point and myriad convenient features, DR. DISH is a high-tech solution that promises water savings at a time when every effort toward conservation is absolutely critical. As we move toward a new era in determining water rights and imposing mandatory restrictions upon each and every person living in affected areas, creating conservation solutions that will be relevant for the lifestyles of the future is especially important, and the agility of designers in coming up with products that quickly cut consumer water consumption will be a key factor in determining whether humanity will be able to adapt to a new era in our relationship with natural resources.
ContributorsMarcinkowski, Margaret Nicole (Author) / Shin, Dosun (Thesis director) / McDermott, Lauren (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / The Design School (Contributor) / Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
I set out to better understand the issues, perceptions & solutions surrounding drought. The question that compelled my project was "What might be all the ways that we can improve the experience of conserving, reusing & educating on the topic of water." Through the process of design research I developed a system of products that improves the user experiences surrounding water. The result is IOW, an intelligent 3-product system that aims to make your water needs & wants smarter & less wasteful.
ContributorsShappee, Christian Kyle (Author) / Shin, Dosun (Thesis director) / McDermott, Lauren (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / The Design School (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
There is a growing consensus that environmental hazards and changing weather patterns disproportionately affect the poor, vulnerable, minority communities. My dissertation studies the nature of risk faced by vulnerable groups of individuals, how these risks affect their labor choice, income, consumption, and migration patterns. In Chapter 1, I study how seniors of different racial and income groups respond to information about hazardous waste sites in their neighborhood and their cleanup process. I find white seniors tend to move out at a higher rate when informed about the presence of a waste site as well as when the site is cleaned up compared to non-white seniors. This suggests that neighborhood gentrification exhibits inertia in the manifestation after the cleanup of Superfund sites. I find an assortative matching of seniors to neighborhoods based on their race and income, reinforcing findings in the environmental justice literature. Chapter 2 documents the effect of drought on labor choices, income, and consumption of rural households in India. I find that household consumption, as well as agricultural jobs, declines in response to drought. Further, I find that these effects are mediated by job skills and land ownership. Specifically, I find that households with working members who have completed primary education account for most of the workers who exit the agricultural sector. In contrast, I find that households with farmland increase their agricultural labor share post-drought. Cultural norms, relative prices, and land market transaction costs provide potential explanations for this behavior. Chapter 3 builds a simple model of household labor allocation based on reduced-form evidence I find in chapter 2. Simulation of the calibrated model implies that projected increases in the frequency of droughts over the next 30 years will have a net effect of a 1\% to 2\% reduction in agricultural labor. While small in percentage terms, this implies that 2.5 to 5 million individuals would leave agriculture. An increase in drought will also increase the size of the manufacturing wage subsidy needed to meet the goals of `Make in India’ policy by 20\%. This is driven by the need to incentivize landowners to reduce farm labor.
ContributorsBasu, Sayahnika (Author) / Kuminoff, Nicolai (Thesis advisor) / Bishop, Kelly (Thesis advisor) / Herrendorf, Berthold (Committee member) / Mueller, Valerie (Committee member) / Murphy, Alvin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Dioecious plants often display sexual segregation in habitat preference and trait expression due to contrasts in reproductive costs. Females may be maladapted to environments with limited available resources, or habitats where resources are diminishing due to climate change. Reduced fitness in female individuals compared to males could lead to skewed sex ratios and reduce population fitness of dioecious species, including one of the most widely distributed dioecious tree species in North America, Acer negundo. The goal of this study was to evaluate how climate warming and drought may enhance sexual segregation in productivity and physiological stress in A. negundo. To address this goal, I measured radial growth and carbon isotope ratios (δ13C) in tree-ring cellulose of 22-year male and female A. negundo trees growing in a common garden in Salt Lake City, UT. The trees were originally transplanted as one-year old cuttings from a nearby site that was 6.5 °C cooler that the common garden. I hypothesized that 1) δ13C would be lower (more negative) in late growth that is formed during the hottest months of the growing season in males than in females, and during years with no supplemental watering, indicating lower stress from heat and drought in males than in females. And 2) radial growth would be greater in males under warm, well-watered conditions and the addition of drought will exacerbate the difference between males and females. To test these hypotheses, cores were extracted from the main stem of nine male and nine female trees with an increment borer. Annual growth was measured on each core and cellulose was extracted to measure annual δ13C ratios. Males had a 0.63‰ lower mean δ13C than females in years after supplemental water had ceased (p = 0.03) and a 4.12 mm wider radial growth compared to females while irrigated (p = 0.02). Although these data did not support my hypotheses per se, results nevertheless indicate that females are more likely to be maladapted to climate warming and drought to a greater extent than males. If so, a combination of drought and heat stress may have deleterious impacts on the population fitness of Acer negundo and other similar dioecious tree species.
ContributorsChisholm, Mary (Author) / Hultine, Kevin R (Thesis advisor) / Throop, Heather (Thesis advisor) / Morino, Kiyomi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Terrestrial ecosystems are critical to human welfare and regulating Earth’s life support systems but many gaps in our knowledge remain regarding how terrestrial plant communities respond to changes in climate or human actions. I used field experiments distributed across three dryland ecosystems in North America to evaluate the consequences of changing precipitation and physical disturbance on plant community structure and function. Evidence from experiments and observational work exploring both plant community composition and ecological processes suggest that physical disturbance and precipitation reductions can reduce the diversity and function of these dryland ecosystems. Specifically, I found that aboveground net primary productivity could be reduced in an interactive manner when precipitation reductions and physical disturbance co-occur, and that within sites, this reduction in productivity was greater when growing-season precipitation was low. Further, I found that these dryland plant communities, commonly dominated by highly drought-resistant shrubs and perennial grasses, were not capable of compensating for the absence of these dominant shrubs and perennial grasses when they were removed by disturbance, and that precipitation reductions (as predicted to occur from anthropogenic climate change) exacerbate these gaps. Collectively, the results of the field experiment suggest that current management paradigms of maintaining cover and structure of native perennial plants in dryland systems are well founded and may be especially important as climate variability increases over time. Evaluating how these best management practices take place in the real world is an important extension of fundamental ecological research. To address the research-management gap in the context of dryland ecosystems in the western US, I used a set of environmental management plans and remotely sensed data to investigate how ecosystem services in drylands are accounted for, both as a supply from the land base and as a demand from stakeholders. Focusing on a less-investigated land base in the United States–areas owned and managed by the Department of Defense–I explored how ecosystem services are produced by this unique land management arrangement even if they are not explicitly managed for under current management schemes. My findings support a growing body of evidence that Department of Defense lands represent a valuable conservation opportunity, both for biodiversity and ecosystem services, if management regimes fully integrate the ecosystem services concept.
ContributorsJordan, Samuel (Author) / Grimm, Nancy (Thesis advisor) / Reed, Sasha (Committee member) / Wu, Jianguo (Committee member) / Throop, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024