Prof. Bert Bras of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, will present a seminar sponsored by the Engineering Systems Division, Sustainability@MIT, and Materials Systems Lab. Abstract: Sustainable design and manufacturing is receiving increased attention. Current design guidance in this area, however, seems to draw more upon experiences and cases with products of engineering that damaged humanity's environment than looking at fundamental principles for achieving sustainability. The engineered world, some argue, could benefit from nature's guidance concerning the environment and sustainability. Humanity has often looked to duplication, imitation and general inspiration by nature to guide innovation in the past, but even if biological inspired solutions to design problems are pursued, it does not necessarily mean that they will automatically result in environmentally superior solutions. In this talk, we highlight our recent work in identifying fundamental principles that underpin the biosphere's inherent sustainability, and how these can support the design and realization of sustainable engineered systems. We present a few characteristic guidelines at the sub-organism, organism and multi-organism scales. As we will show, some principles observed provide new perspectives on product design, human energy consumption, and industrial process organization. For example, an observed upper limit on mass specific metabolic rates in organisms of 40 W/kg leads to the formulation of a constraint on the rate of energy consumption per unit mass (specific energy consumption rate (SECR)).