Life cycle design is a proactive approach for integrating pollution prevention and resource conservation strategies into the development of more ecologically and economically sustainable product systems. Cross media pollutant transfer and the shifting of other impacts can be avoided by addressing the entire life cycle, which includes raw materials acquisition, materials processing, manufacturing and assembly, use and service, retirement, disposal and the ultimate fate of residuals.
The goal of life cycle design is to minimize aggregate risks and impacts over this life cycle. This goal can only be attained through the balancing of environmental, performance, cost, cultural, legal, and technical requirements of the product system. Concepts such as concurrent design, total quality management, cross- disciplinary teams, and multi-attribute decision making are essential elements of life cycle design that help meet these goals.
The framework for life cycle design was developed to be applicable for all product domains. It was written to assist not only design professionals but all other constituents who have an important role in life cycle design including corporate executives, product managers, production workers, distributors, environmental health and safety staff, purchasers, accountants, marketers, salespersons, legal staff, consumers, and government regulators. A coordinated effort is required to institute changes needed for successful implementation of life cycle design.
Part I seeks to promote the reduction of environmental imparts and health risks through a systems approach to design. The approach is based on the product life cycle, which includes raw materials acquisition and processing, manufacturing, use/service, resource recovery, and disposal. A life cycle design framework was developed to provide guidance for more effectively conserving resources and energy, preventing pollution, and reducing the aggregate environmental impacts and health risks associated with a product system. This framework addresses the product, process, distribution, and management/information components of each product system.
Part II describes the three components of a life cycle assessment (inventory analysis, impact analysis, and improvement analysis) as well as scoping activities, presents a brief overview of the development of the life cycle assessment process, and develops guidelines and principles for implementation of a product life cycle assessment. The major states in a life cycle are raw materials acquisition, manufacturing, consumer use/reuse/maintenance, and recycle/waste management. The basic steps of performing a life cycle inventory (defining the goals and system boundaries, including scoping; gathering and developing data; presenting and reviewing data; and interpreting and communicating results) are presented along with the general issues to be addressed. The system boundaries, assumptions, and conventions to be addressed in each stage of the inventory are presented.

For almost a century, a relatively smooth cooperation characterized transatlantic communication; problems mostly involved technical compatibility and were resolved by technologists of the monopolistic telephone organizations on either side of the Atlantic. In recent years, however, the nature of international communications, its institutions, and its collaborative arrangements have radically changed. There now exists a great variety in the patterns of ownership and usage of telecommunications across different countries. This has led to a disequilibrium in the world telecommunications market that raises complex questions: Can evolving domestic deregulation be reconciled with an international regulatory regime? How does international trade regulation affect multinational governmental cooperation and private collaboration? Is competition viable in all sectors of the international telecommunications industry?

This text summarizes and contextualizes the ideas that have formed visual arts practices in the 20th century. Art, design and architecture are located in their social and political contexts, and the ideas of modernism are traced from the development of industrialized Europe at the turn of the century to the post-industrial, post-colonial present. The complex relationship between modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts is examined and the book concludes with a review of the global impact of the new technologies on art and design production.

Krieger revisits the ideas of his now infamous article of some thirty years ago in "Science" magazine. His aim is to give an account of design, one that experienced designers will say, 'Yes, That's just what it is like ' At the same time, Krieger offers an analysis of the tensions that design operates within; between perfection and contingency, between wholes and parts, between the talk we make about the world and the world itself.

Krieger takes design--in architecture, landscape, interiors, engineering, and in systems and computer science--to be modeled by traditional theological and artistic problems. And here, he claims, design has traditionally been a redesign of nature. For nature is, as Durkheim would describe it, a totem. Our collective ritual devotion to it allows us to enliven or animate it, and so it may animate us as well. Curiously, much of design and discourse about it now takes place in the computer software engineering world, especially among those concerned with patterns and object- oriented programming. In developing a notion of plastic trees, Krieger probes just what could be wrong with such artifices. As he illustrates, what we call nature is almost always a product of deliberate design. It is as if people make discoveries in exploration, discoveries of places already occupied aboriginally. In essence, he asserts what we actually have is a virtual authenticity, more real than any original could possibly be--since the original was never meant to be sacralized or featured in our lives. A provocative analysis that scholars and students of architecture and planning, environmental studies, engineering and computer science will find stimulating.