Design SPACE Lab

Welcome to the Design SPACE Lab

The Design SPACE Lab is currently inactive. 

From 2015-2023, we were based in the School of Systems and Enterprises at Stevens Institute of Technology, researching strategies for designing optimal products and policies in the face of sustainability and complexity challenges. Our group specializes in design methodologies, complex systems modeling and analysis, multidisciplinary design optimization, and life cycle thinking.

Design SPACE is an acronym for Design of Sustainable Products Across Complex Environments. The core components that are common to all of our work are design, sustainability, and complexity. From a technical perspective, we aim to support engineering design and account for engineering designers within systems such as product markets. We are interested in improving the ways that designers account for sustainability, which includes system longevity, environmental friendliness, social responsibility, and economic stability. We also seek to aid design decision-making within complex environments, which may be multi-objective, multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder, or human-centric. These are some of the trickiest challenges of our time, and they demand a systems approach to find better ways to make design and policy decisions.

Research areas

Within the three themes of design, sustainability, and complexity, our work fits within the boundaries and intersections of three research areas: Design and optimization methods, systems simulation and policy, and systems and design education.