Development of Sustainable Design Index for Office Furniture Design and its CAD-Based Implementation

Abstract

Sustainable design is a universal concern and due to that it becomes significant reference in numerous industries especially furniture products. In order to overcome the difficulties in Furniture Industry to determine the sustainable design to their products, the concept of Sustainable Design Index (SDI) was proposed in this paper. The SDI construction is combined with the designer’s daily activities and the design process, in this research the open plan system (OPS) is used for the subject matter. This paper presents several design tools and strategies which are integrated to support the development of sustainable design index as a solution. It is important to develop a model or method for formulating the SDI for industry to work with particularly the product’s sustainability performance strongly linking to the consumer’s satisfaction. In order to develop a robust SDI representation, an innovative approach for structured and systematic sustainable furniture design is proposed mainly based on modular product architecture, reconfigurability, using design structure matrix (DSM) and axiomatic design (AD). The SDI implementation is to enhance the designer by seamlessly integrating SDI algorithms within the CAD design environment and designers’ design operations.