‘ConcepTe’: Supporting Environmentally Benign Design Decision-Making at Conceptual Stage

Abstract

Decisions with respect to product characteristics and life cycle processes, which in turn determine the product’s environmental footprint, are mostly made during the conceptual design stage. Therefore, it is the ideal stage to support design decision-making with respect to reducing the environmental impact of the solution, as is the aim of environmentally benign design. However, availability of impact assessment and design tools, which accommodate the inherent abstraction and lack of knowledge characteristic of this stage, is poor. Also, currently designers are unable to utilise design guidelines and assessment reports owing to poor understanding and need of expertise to incorporate these results into the design process. Thus, ‘concepTe’ (conceptual design Tool for environmentally benign design) is envisioned to aids environmental impact (EI) estimation of conceptual solutions, upon considering its inherent uncertainties, and supports effective communication of these results in a language and at the same level of abstraction in which the solution has been conceptualised by the designer. This paper discusses the development of a ‘proof of concept’ of the intended tool which supports selection of the most environmentally benign solution as concept upon evaluation of several variants, i.e. decision-making, at conceptual design stage. The paper further elucidates the effectiveness of the tool to support environmentally benign design decision-making during conceptual design process, through preliminary empirical studies.