Abstract
Although products can contribute to ecosystems positively, they can cause negative environmental impacts throughout their life cycles, from obtaining raw material, production, and use, to end of life. It is reported that most negative environmental impacts are decided at early design phases, which suggests that the determination of product sustainability should be considered as early as possible, such as during the conceptual design stage, when it is still possible to modify the design concept. However, most of the existing concept evaluation methods or tools are focused on assessing the feasibility or creativity of the concepts generated, lacking the measurements of sustainability of concepts. The paper explores key factors related to sustainable design with regard to environmental impacts, and describes a set of objective measures of sustainable product design concept evaluation, namely, material, production, use, and end of life. The rationales of the four metrics are discussed, with corresponding measurements. A case study is conducted to demonstrate the use and effectiveness of the metrics for evaluating product design concepts. The paper is the first study to explore the measurement of product design sustainability focusing on the conceptual design stage. It can be used as a guideline to measure the level of sustainability of product design concepts to support designers in developing sustainable products. Most significantly, it urges the considerations of sustainability design aspects at early design phases, and also provides a new research direction in concept evaluation regarding sustainability.
Highlights
IntroductionThe world population increased from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.8 billion in 2020 [1]
Published: 11 June 2021The world population increased from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.8 billion in 2020 [1]
The design expert, with over 8 years of experience in design engineering, participated voluntarily in the case study to assess the sustainability of the two portable blender concepts
Summary
The world population increased from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.8 billion in 2020 [1]. The population growth has led to global issues, such as overconsumption of resources and energy and pollution. Sustainability is a fundamental attribute playing an increasingly significant role in design nowadays, especially in product design, where it is considered a requirement for solving those global challenges [3]. There has been an increasing focus on sustainable product developments due to environmental regulations and expectations of consumers [4]. It is imperative for modern firms and enterprises to consider sustainability in product design and development [5]. Sustainable design is described as a design approach for reducing the environmental impacts throughout a product’s entire life cycle [8,9,10]
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