The concept of a design spiral or a design wheel has been around for many years. The spiral concept pays deference to the fact that a designer needs to balance many factors to develop a successful design.
In the original version of the spiral the designer balanced physical characteristics of the design against the mission and cost of the design.
The designer would enter the wheel or spiral at a specific point with a basic assumption (often this was the design mission) and from the mission entry point step along the other wheel points making calculations and estimates based on the initial assumption. Upon the completion of the first trip around the wheel the designer would discover that assumptions and estimates in his original entry point would have to be adjusted. A designer would keep working along the wheel recalculating and changing estimates and assumption at every step along the wheel until she felt she had optimally adjusted each wheel segment.
The great change in engineering in the last decades is the realization that the original design wheel was incomplete. For generations the wheel did not have human factors, environmental and sustainability steps and, as such, designs were never optimized for those steps.
Panel EC-7 realizes that the use of environmental, human factors and sustainability steps in design is still poor and its main mission is to promote the incorporation of those steps into the design wheel.