Digital integration of total lifecycle tools for sustainable product design

The purpose of the study was to demonstrate the need and usefulness of using a cultural representation tool in cultural product design. In this study, it is believed that culture can be conceptualized with critical cultural elements that define the core features of culture. These elements were called cultural DNAs. To demonstrate the need and the impact of having a cultural representation tool in product design, a between-subject experiment was conducted with 18 student participants majoring in Industrial Design. The participants were tasked with designing mugs that addressed the Confucius culture and were divided into two groups—one was provided with a written representation of Confucius culture (the experimental group) while the other was not (the control group). Results of participants’ design outcomes showed that participants who were given a representation tool of the Confucius culture used more types and higher numbers of cultural DNAs in their design. This study also found that the cultural elements used by the experimental group were more relevant with Confucius. Results of this study showed the need of a cultural representation tool in cultural product design.

Sustainable product design and development: A review of tools, applications and research prospects

A cyberlearning platform for enhancing undergraduate engineering education in sustainable product design

The advent of additive manufacturing technologies presents a number of opportunities that have the potential to greatly benefit designers, and contribute to the sustainability of products. Additive manufacturing technologies have removed many of the manufacturing restrictions that may previously have compromised a designer’s ability to make the product they imagined, which can increase product desirability, pleasure and attachment. Products can also be extensively customized to the user thus, once again, potentially increasing their desirability, pleasure and attachment and therefore their longevity. As additive manufacturing technologies evolve, and more new materials become available, and multiple material technologies are further developed, the field of product design has the potential to greatly change.This paper examines aspects of additive manufacturing from a sustainable design perspective could become a useful tool in the arsenal to bring about the sustainable design of consumer products.

Sustainable product design plans the entire life cycle of a product from its raw material selection, conceptual and structural formation, manufacturing processing, and usage to its end-of-life, reuse, and recycle. The product design needs the sustainable knowledge and proper tools. Current computer-aided design systems are insufficient to represent complex relationships of product functions, structures and life cycle options. It is required for design tools to support product life cycle planning with multi-objective optimal solutions. In this paper, our experience in design of a wheelchair is used as an example to discuss the need of design tools. The aim is to define ideal tools for design of sustainable products.

Integration of green quality function deployment and fuzzy theory: a case study on green mobile phone design

Sustainable product is expected to minimize the negative impact of product life cycle on environment, society, and culture. Sustainable product design tools are techniques of incorporating the concepts of sustainability during the product design process. In this paper, a literature review is mentioned that identifies various tools for sustainable product design and further ranks the tools using an analytical hierarchy process of relative comparison. The results show that design of sustainability, modular design, and life cycle assessment are the tools that have a significant impact on improvement of sustainability of the design.KeywordsSustainable product designAnalytical hierarchal processSustainabilitySustainability toolsSustainability assessment

To promote sustainable manufacturing it is imperative that closed-loop material flows are considered during sustainable product design. The usefulness of various sustainable product design decision support tools depends on the ability to access accurate data related to the different lifecycle stages. The importance of digitally integrating disparate data sources and the potential for using digital threads to facilitate integration has been widely discussed. However, the approach to develop such digitally integrated capabilities is lacking in extant literature. This paper presents the development of an interoperable digital thread to integrate data from different sources across the total lifecycle interfaced with a suite of decision support tools. The application of the digitally integrated capability is demonstrated using an industrial case study. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the digital thread to acquire data from different lifecycle stages and to conduct sustainability performance analyses to help identify the most sustainable product configuration designs.

Product design and development for technology plays an important role in the economic growth of the country. Sustainable products are the products that are compatible with the environment and nature throughout their entire life cycle. Traditionally, during product design, the manufacturing industry mainly focuses on the overall reduction of cost, but due to government pressure and by considering environmental problems and awareness of sustainability, manufacturers are now also considering the environmental and sustainability criteria in their decision-making process of product development. Automotive manufacturing industries need to adopt sustainability principles to survive in a globally competitive environment. Sustainable product designSustainable Product Design tools are needed to enhance the environmental, social, and economic performance of products. Researchers and practitioners have done a lot of research on product design and development, by considering the sustainability and environmental aspects need to be explored to achieve the triple bottom line of sustainability. In this context, the aim of this chapter is to categorize into three main areas of sustainability: environmental, social, and economic, and analyze with different tools for the product design of the electric vehicleElectric Vehicle. This chapter will provide a roadmap for the sustainable product design of electrical vehicles and discuss the issues, challenges, and future research direction.

Current environmental regulations and customer expectations force manufacturing companies to develop new products considering ecological, social, and economic issues. At present, product sustainability, time-to-market, and profit are equally important factors in the new product development process. Consequently, product design should embrace issues related to sustainability in the entire product life cycle. These issues refer to manufacturing processes, product use, and the post-use phase, including product reuse, remanufacturing, recycling or disposal. Product design considering these issues is called sustainable design or eco-design. The product development process aims to create a new product that can be a modification of existing products or be completely new for a company and market. Innovations are widely used as a key component for addressing sustainable development concerns. The role of product design and innovation in the quest for sustainability has received considerable attention among researchers and businesses in recent years. This research is a novel bibliometric analysis of sustainable product development, product design, and product innovation in the last 30 years, from 1993 to 2022. The results of data analysis embrace trends regarding the yearly number of publications devoted to sustainable product development, sustainable product design, and sustainable product innovation. Moreover, the collected publications were classified into subject areas, source titles, and source type. The bibliometric analysis reveals the most popular journals to knowledge dissemination of sustainable product development, sustainable design, and sustainable innovation. The results show that the increase of publications devoted to sustainable product design and sustainable product innovation is particularly strong in the last 5 years. Moreover, the number of publications related to sustainable product design is over ten times larger than related to sustainable product innovation.

Research studies confirm that embracing sustainability in product design and manufacturing not only yields environmental improvements, but offers key business benefits. There is an increasing pressure to adopt a more sustainable approach to product design and manufacture. Organizations that are actively engaged in sustainable product design and development cite impressive levels of improvement over their poorer performing peers in product innovation, quality, safety and revenue growth alongside anticipated environmental and energy gains. Sustainability in design and manufacturing has a lot to do with “doing better with less,” and embracing a broader view of product development, and examining full lifecycle of the product and the impact that its design, manufacture, performance and disposal can have across not only on business, but on the environment and society, as well. The process of rethinking a product’s design so that it is more durable contains fewer parts and easily packaged and recycled also drives innovation and quality. The goal of sustainable product design (SPD) is to produce products and/or to provide services, which are sustainable and achieve their required functionality, meet customer requirements and are cost effective. In other words, SPD is about producing superior products and/or services that fulfil traditional criteria as well as sustainability requirements. The requirement to develop sustainable product is one of the key challenges of 21st century. This paper describes a system that identifies sustainability related performance measures for products in terms of: a) Sustainable product design by robust design. b) Sustainable design by quality of service. The first case study is on a laser based measuring instrument which supports the theory of sustainable product by robust design techniques The objective of the robust design study is to find the optimum recommended factor setting for the surface roughness analyser to minimize the variability in the readings. This instrument relies on the spread of the laser light on the work piece to determine surface roughness; therefore, the analyser’s reliability depends primarily on everything involved with the laser and its path. There are a minimum number of parts to achieve this function since the laser can scan over the work piece, substituting functionality in place of additional parts. The use of surface roughness analyser for online measurement of surface finish and continuous online monitoring and control with a feedback provides the robustness in quality and sustainability. The second case study, which is on elevator quality of service, is considered to support the theory of sustainable design by quality of service. This example shows how the design considerations are influenced and closely linked to the quality of service and maintenance. To support the theory of sustainability by quality of service, this case study examines elevator design and maintenance and recommends a new procedure based on Root Couse Analysis resulting in Elevator Condition Index (ECI). ECI is a new procedure and is applied based on original equipment reliability, projected average life cycle of key wear components, number of run cycles since maintenance was last performed on each component, cost of emergency repair vs. cost of maintenance vs. likelihood of failure. It supports service based on prognostics rather than routine service cycles. Sustainable design and manufacturing is possible if we deploy the virtual engineering tools to monitor and service manufacturing machinery so that the sustainable benefits are maintained throughout the product design cycle. The choice of a workplace structure depends on the design of the parts and lot sizes to be manufactured as well as market factors, such as the responsiveness to changes. Designers should be aware of the manufacturing consequences of their decisions because minor design changes during the early stages often prevent major problems later. As a part of product performance evaluation, the use of capability index to maintain process quality can lead to beneficial results.

Product design and selection using fuzzy QFD and fuzzy MCDM approaches

Background: Integrating sustainability development' aspects in the design process is becoming, a growth area in companies. Consequently, sustainable product design has to consider the different aspects of sustainability throughout its life cycle phases in addition of other requirements. This integration is becoming more complicated due the difficulty of managing the constraints and alternatives related to the product and stakeholders needs. This study aims to highlights the most used Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) tools and methods used in sustainable product design process. Contribution: Product design process involves interesting decisional tasks such as the choice of materials, standard parts, technical solutions. Hence, the contribution of this work is to help designer to adopt relevant MCDM tools and methods that can be integrated to other tools to facilitate and to justify their decisional tasks. Method: Several methods have been affected to solve the problems related to this complexity such as MCDM. A literature review was conducted based on Siencedirect and GoogleScholar articles databases. After filtering more than 200 articles only 62 articles were considered to analyze the correlation between sustainable product design and MCDM. Results: Classified MCDM use according to the type of choices to achieve SPD goals. This paper allowed us to find matches between MCDM methods and SPD problem. The majority of case studies result show that a large portion of sustainable design methods, techniques, and tools are applied to the sustainable product’ along its different life cycle phases Conclusion: It is noticed that the use of MCDM methods are an important outcome in the sustainable product design process and deeply helps designers to make suitable choices. Also, several matches relating MCDM, other methods and sustainable product design sphere are discussed

Quality function deployment (QFD) is effective and a very useful analysing tool in product design and development process. The determination of the fulfilment levels of customer needs and engineering characteristics is an important issue during QFD process for development of new product concept. To solve the uncertainty in QFD as well as to tackle the vague nature of product development processes, numerous researchers have applied the fuzzy set theory to QFD. This paper describes an approach where computer aided design and engineering (CAD/CAE) and design for environment (DFE) integration was deployed and using fuzzy QFD tool, product sustainable actions were prioritised. The feasibility of deploying CAD/CAE and DFE tools for achieving effectiveness in the product development process through a real case has been ensured. Finally, application of the fuzzy QFD logic is considered to be highly valuable to translate linguistic judgements required for relationships and correlations matrixes into numerical values.

To achieve triple bottom line sustainability, a system requires a balance of its social, economic, and environmental axioms. This multi-dimensional system has multiple stakeholders with different objectives acting within the system, leading to an increased level of complexity. Product design is an area with significant potential to achieve sustainable development, which is also influenced by policies. Product designers/managers and policymakers have been identified as critical stakeholders within this complex system, and their decisions directly affect the transition toward sustainable product design. However, these stakeholders have different perspectives on sustainability, and there is a lack of understanding of the main characteristics of a sustainable design system and its requirements. This research aims to find a detailed and unified understanding of these stakeholder’s perspectives, practices, and requirements. An online survey investigated the views of engineers/managers and policymakers in the United States to find their definitions of sustainability, their assessment methods, drivers, and barriers of sustainability. Finally, the participants were asked to identify their requirements for a sustainable design tool that can assist them effectively in designing a sustainable product. Considering the exploratory nature of this study, a targeted sample of 50 participants was selected to capture in-depth, qualitative insights, enabling a nuanced understanding of this complex system. The open-ended questions were designed to obtain detailed responses, which were analyzed qualitatively to develop a comprehensive view of the current state and future requirements for sustainable design tools. This targeted approach allowed the study to probe deeply into each stakeholder’s frame of reference, facilitating the identification of critical factors for a successful transition to sustainable design in both industry and policy. The results identified the critical factors that contribute to a successful transition toward sustainable product design in industry and policies while the requirements found in this study provided a road map to meet the diverse needs of these stakeholders.