A Hybrid MADM Model for Product Design Evaluation and Improvement

Abstract

Global warming and climate change are the most pressing issues in the world. This is the inevitable result of human beings pursuing a better quality of life and materials. If the green design concept is used in the design and manufacture of products, the impact of production on the environment will be greatly reduced. Because of this, green product design assessment and improvement activities play an important role in achieving the 2030 sustainable development goals. Product design is the forefront of the entire product development process, and it plays a very critical role. The purpose of this study is to develop a decision-making model for helping decision makers to evaluate and improve the performance of product design systematically. The model combines the design standard of the iF world design guide and multi-attribute decision-making methods. First, the DEMATEL-based analytic network process is used to establish the influential relationship and weights of attributes. Next, the VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno with aspiration-level method is used to obtain the gap between each evaluation attribute and the aspiration level of each design. Finally, this evaluation result uses the influential network relationship map (INRM) to propose various improvement strategies with causal influence. This study uses products from a Taiwanese furniture design company as an empirical case, which is a leading brand and benchmark in Taiwan’s furniture industry. The research results show that the proposed model can help decision makers to choose the most appropriate design scheme (i.e., the design with the smallest gap from expectations); designers can also improve the gap between product design and expectations.