PeakEngineer's blog

There are a number of practical considerations you should keep in mind early in the design process, which fall under the “-ilities” category – things such as maintainability, reliability, availability, and producibility. These characteristics of your system/community describe the practicality of building, using, fixing, and upgrading your project. I’ll talk about each one in turn, but for this post I’ll focus on maintainability.

Producing food is a critical need for any community project. Your first thought might be traditional gardens or farm plots, neatly ordered into precise rows, tucked away on a back corner of your yards. That’s certainly one vision of personal food production, but is far from the most efficient. Why not let your food production aid in other areas of your design?

There are a number of discussions and questions in the comments this week about some very key issues. I wanted to capture my thoughts in a full post so nobody misses them.

Back in college I had a friend who was convinced the only utensil she needed in life was a spoon. She lived by that assertion – hacking away at dry dorm steak, deftly balancing leaves of lettuce, and smoothly buttering her bread, all with a spoon. The rest of us would laugh or shake our heads, wondering to one another about what a quirky girl she was.

Something very critical to your overall design mindset is the concept of Acceptance Criteria. There are the qualities your design must have in order to be considered even a marginal success. Every other design goal can flop, but if the Acceptance Criteria fail then all is lost.

Just to get the designer wheels in your head started spinning, Peak Energy posted a good link to a story about a successful ground heat pump.

Okay, I promise this is nearly the last boring post before really diving into design strategies and solutions. I’ll try to make this as interesting as I can, but bear with me – this is important!

Now that we have satisfactorily defined our example problem, we can start figuring out what tangibles we need. This process is known in Systems Engineering-speak as requirements definition.

A Systems Engineering solution begins by accurately identifying the needs, goals, and objectives of your project. These items can be as broad or narrow as required, but they are strictly used to define the problem, not imply any sort of design solution – that comes later.

The Peak Oil community focuses its efforts on two main themes: predicting the peak and exploring sustainable life. There is a great deal of discussion on sustainable design and organic subsistence farming, but there is very little in the way of comprehensively engineering future communities. I would like to change that fact.