Investigating students’ eco-misperceptions in applying eco-design methods

Abstract

This study collects and discusses the misperceptions about eco-design, renamed eco-misperception, emerged from a group of students while applying common eco-design methods. We define eco-misperceptions as erroneous interpretations of the novice eco-designers, about the environmental sustainability of design solutions, according to more experienced eco-designers. They are detectable by qualitatively or quantitatively analysing how the novice eco-designers present the proposed or identified design solutions. To obtain the eco-misperceptions, the end-of-year projects and the interviews of 61 students attending the master's degree in mechanical and management engineering from two Italian universities were considered. These projects concern the reduction of the environmental impacts of three real industrial products, supported by existing eco-design methods. The systematic analysis of the proposed solutions showed that students committed different eco-misperceptions, not related to the comprehension of eco-design but to its practical application and involving different aspects: the psychological inertia leading to address a given problem in a habitual way, the selection of the not appropriate examples to inspire, a limited consideration regarding the life cycle of the product, the difficulty in selecting the appropriate level of detail during eco-design and eco-assessment, and the difficulty in dealing with problems presented in a descriptive way rather than through a precise mathematical formulation. Unlike other contributions in the literature, in this study the collected eco-misperception are in greater number, more heterogeneous, more detailed in definition and contextualised through examples that can be used to improve eco-design courses.