We aim to bring to firms and classrooms worldwide a sound and compelling pedagogic basis for the nonviolent overthrow of bad engineering.

Factor Ten Engineering (10xE) is an ambitious project undertaken by Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) to accelerate the reform of engineering pedagogy and practice. Collaboratively developing a casebook on integrative design, we plan to equip the next generation of engineers, and retread the existing ones, with the tools of whole-system design. These whole-system thinkers will then be equipped to develop far more sustainable (and more profitable) solutions to engineering problems. Case-studies we have already collected show very large—even order-of-magnitude—energy and resource savings with uncompromised performance, and often lower capital cost, across a wide range of engineering problems.

The casebook will be organized in a facing-columns format, with a thorough engineering analysis of several dozen of the most interesting cases alongside the standard-practice cases to show why they yield such strikingly different results. Our aim is to have the design principles build on each other, so that by the end of the book, the reader’s “mental furniture” is irreversibly rearranged and they can never go back to piecemeal design. The cases will span the range of engineering disciplines and common applications. Through astonishing but, once understood, obvious cases, we aim to bring to firms and classrooms worldwide a sound and compelling pedagogic basis for the nonviolent overthrow of bad engineering.

While we believe the target of ten-fold resource productivity through better engineering is achievable, it is clearly not easy. Such optimization will need original trans-disciplinary thinking and a willingness to question familiar practice. But real cases are the essential foundation for these shifts. In recent years, RMI has used whole-system thinking in the redesign of close to $30 billion worth of diverse facilities. Our clients are happy to learn how to do such radically efficient design, but we are not so happy because we keep seeing the same design errors over and over. If the design had been properly done in the first place, such improvements would not be necessary or even possible. Rather than correcting these errors in minute particulars, it would be far better to change engineering pedagogy and practice so such errors are ultimately extirpated. And to this end, we propose the ambitious 10xE project.

We invite engineers and teachers with experience or interest in whole-system design to join us in this endeavor. To ensure that these reforms are effective and durable, we need a strong network of first-rate practitioners and teachers who expertly apply whole-system design to be our agents for change. In addition to building our network of people (already several hundred worldwide), we will also start to assemble a portfolio of “high-brain-Velcro” cases, and we are seeking examples and ideas from the worldwide engineering community. Cases should be clear, elegant, repeatable, whole-system solutions that “tunnel through the cost barrier” and show at least a factor four increase in resource productivity.

For more information on how you can get involved in this project, or to submit a case idea, please contact us.