Abstract
Abstract The impact of engineered products is a topic of concern in society. Product impact may fall under the categories of economic, environmental or social impact, with the last category defined as the effect of a product on the day-to-day life of people. Design teams lack sufficient tools to estimate the social impact of products, and the combined impacts of economic, environmental and social impacts for the products they are designing. This paper aims to provide a framework for the estimation of product impact during product design. To estimate product impact, models of both the product and society are required. This framework integrates models of the product, scenario, society and impact into an agent-based model to estimate product impact. Although this paper demonstrates the framework using only social impact, the framework can also be applied to economic or environmental impacts individually or all three concurrently. Agent-based modelling has been used previously for product adoption models, but it has not been extended to estimate product impact. Having tools for impact estimation allows for optimising the product design parameters to increase the potential positive impact and reduce potential negative impact.
Highlights
The world is seeing an ever-increasing call for businesses to do more than maximise shareholder value (Henderson 2018; Gelles & Yaffe-Bellany 2019)
By having models for the product and society, connections can be made between product parameters and how they influence the impact a product has on society. This is an example of a bottom-up modelling approach using agent-based model (ABM), and the authors recognise that other approaches such as a top-down differential model using system dynamics could be used if the governing relations can be understood
Data on user preferences can effectively be collected in a survey. This survey includes how important the selected product parameters are to a potential user (Alberini 1995), as well as information related to the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) categories of attitude, social norms and perceived behavioural control surrounding the adoption of the product (Ajzen 1991)
Summary
The world is seeing an ever-increasing call for businesses to do more than maximise shareholder value (Henderson 2018; Gelles & Yaffe-Bellany 2019). The framework may be used to model economic, environmental and social impact, this paper focuses mainly on social impact This framework allows for building ABMs to estimate social impact as a design tool so that the product design team can make choices to increase the positive impact and reduce the negative impact of the product before it enters the market. Following the description of the framework, an illustration of how the framework can be used is provided using face masks and vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic Tools such as this framework will help design teams make decisions about what aspects of a product are most important to increase potential positive impact while limiting potential negative impact. These methods will help in understanding relationships between product parameters and the societal response to changes in those product parameters
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