Life-cycle thinking, analysis and design

The products and buildings that we design and build can be either future-friendly, or not. City environments become traps if they can only operate on large environmental footprints. in contrast, resource-efficient, non-wasteful cities, operating within closedloop systems, can support a high quality of life with only a small footprint. The longer that the life cycles of our products and buildings are designed to last, the more critical it is to ensure that we are not creating a negative legacy that will damage our social and physical well-being (WWF International, 2006). In an ideal world, the life-cycle impacts of all materials and processes would be fully defined, to allow designers to clearly and unequivocally see which is better from an environmental perspective (Walker, 2007). Designers, engineers and architects have a history of innovation and are therefore well placed to use life-cycle approaches to creatively lock in positive features and to innova - tively lock out negative impacts at the design stage. The focus of this chapter will be to analyse the positive role that designers and corporations can and are playing through the use of cyclic approaches in decision-making, to reduce the negative impacts generated by the services, products and buildings that they create.