Previous studies have failed to provide a comprehensive view on the value perception of green products. The present research takes up this challenge through an experiment in which 43 participants have interacted with and evaluated 40 products—20 baseline products and 20 green products of the same categories. The experiment included both self-assessments to monitor conscious evaluations of the products and biometric measurements (Eye-Tracking and Galvanic Skin Response) to capture unconscious aspects. The results show that different forms of perceived value emerge clearly. Green products, for which participants required greater efforts in the search for relevant information, boost the value attributed to creative solutions still believed of high quality. This effect is significantly more evident for participants showing remarkable interest for sustainability issues. Conversely, alternative products feature greater value perception because they are acknowledged to be functional and reliable.

AbstractDesign is inherently affected by human-related factors and it is of no surprise that the fine-tuning of instruments capable of measuring aspects of human behavior has attracted interest in the design field. The recalled instruments include a variety of devices that capture and quantitatively assess people's unintentional and unconscious reactions and that are generally referred as neurophysiological or biometric. The number of experimental applications of these instruments in design was extremely limited as of 2016, when Lohmeyer and Meboldt published a first report on relevant measures and their interpretation in design. In the last few years, the number of relevant publications has increased dramatically and this determines the opportunity to carry out a comprehensive review in the field. The reviewed contributions are analyzed and classified according to, among others, instruments used, the kind of stakeholders involved and the supported design research activities. The role of biometric measures with respect to traditional research methods is emphasized too. The discussed instruments can represent supports or substitutes for traditional approaches, as well as they are capable of exploring phenomena that could not be addressed hitherto. The intensity of research concerning experiments with biometric measurements is discussed too; a particular focus of the final discussion is the individuation of obstacles that prevent them from becoming commonplace in design research.

Despite the potential to lead to enhanced environmental performance, the extent to which eco-design leads to success is still unclear. In order to lay bare the effects of eco-design implementation, this paper focuses on understanding the correlations between specific eco-design principles and success through an exploratory study. A sample of 178 products, characterized in terms of their success levels and implemented eco-design principles, was statistically analyzed. The results indicate a number of positive correlations for principles that tend to favor success (e.g. intensified use and product/service systems) and negative correlations for principles that tend to moderate the chances of success (e.g. minimize packaging). Although the mechanisms that cause this phenomenon should be further investigated, the findings can provide designers with additional recommendations for the selection of eco-design principles.

Developing accurate design data to enable the effective use of new materials is undoubtedly an essential goal in the gear industry. To speed up this process, Single Tooth Bending Fatigue (STBF) tests can be conducted. However, STBF tests tend to overestimate the material properties with respect to tests conducted on Running Gears (RG). Therefore, it is common practice to use a constant correction factor fkorr, of value 0.9 to exploit STBF results to design actual gears, e.g., through ISO 6336. In this paper, the assumption that this coefficient can be considered independent from the gear material, geometry, and loading condition was questioned, and through the combination of numerical simulations with a multiaxial fatigue criterion, a method for the calculation of fkorr was proposed. The implementation of this method using different gear geometries and material properties shows that fkorr varies with the gears geometrical characteristics, the material fatigue strength, and the load ratio (R) set in STBF tests. In particular, by applying the Findley criterion, it was found that, for the same gear geometry, fkorr depends on the material as well. Specifically, fkorr increases with the ratio between the bending and torsional fatigue limits. Moreover, through this method it was shown that the characteristics related to the material and the geometry have a relevant effect in determining the critical point (at the tooth root) where the fracture nucleates.

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