Analysing product concepts with respect to social sustainability is a contemporary challenge for which there is little support available for product developers. Our aim was to build on previous work to support product developers in a case company with this challenge. Previously a definition of social sustainability was developed from science on how the social system functions. We designed a first prototype of support for product developers to use this previously developed definition when analysing the extraction lifecycle activities associated with their product concepts. The prototype instructs users to model the location of the extraction activities and then use existing databases and indicators to analyse the social sustainability performance of each location. The databases and indicators were selected according to their relevance to scientific principles for social sustainability. We then performed initial evaluation of the support, through which we learnt that the approach may make it possible for product developers to analyse extraction activities, but the level of accuracy of analysis that is possible is not good enough for comparing the concepts in the case study decision. We discuss the implications of these challenges and suggest that it may be better to re-design our approach in order to provide learningful support for product developers or support for other decisionmaking in the company.
The aim of this research was to integrate sustainable development and design-thinking-based product design in order that the product design then contributes to society's transition to a sustainable future. This is an important pursuit since product lifecycles are a major cause of society's current sustainability challenges. To address this, many authors argue for integrating sustainable development into existing design processes rather than developing stand-alone tools and methods. Through action research with a design consultancy who wanted to start working with sustainable product design, we iterated between three stages: understanding needs, designing action, and trying out the action. The first stage comprised document analysis, focus-group style workshops, a survey and interviews. When designing the actions (enhancements to their design-thinking-based process), we drew on literature on sustainable product design, decision-making for sustainability, and organisational learning and change for sustainability. We also drew on our research partners' practical experience. The enhanced process was tried out and further developed through feedback, student testing and co-development meetings. The result is an enhanced process where project teams (i) use the outcomes from the inspiration phase of the existing process to choose sustainable design strategies that are relevant for their particular project. Once the teams have chosen which strategies to work with, for example, design for remanufacture, we suggest that they (ii) use the strategies to develop ideation foci/questions that help them explore the design space. The third enhancement is for teams to (iii) compare concepts with respect to sustainability as part of their concept comparison and evaluation.
<b><i>Introduction:</i></b> Research has consistently demonstrated that the COVID-19 pandemic, and resulting sudden shift to online learning (OL), had detrimental impacts on the motivation and mental health of university students. To date however this research has been cross-sectional and quantitative. <b><i>Method:</i></b> This study employed a mixed-methods design to examine the experiences of students at a large national Australian University both at the outset of the pandemic in 2020 (<i>n</i> = 824) and again 6 months later (<i>n</i> = 254) at the conclusion of their academic year. <b><i>Results:</i></b> Key findings from this study highlighted that despite quantitative findings suggesting poorer attitudes toward learning during the pandemic, qualitatively students perceived both positives and negatives to studying online. The qualitative results further highlighted that this experience was not the same for all and suggests the need to reconsider the standard approaches to offering support for students. <b><i>Conclusion:</i></b> Students reported poor mental health in both time points, but outlined avenues which improved not only their mental health but also their motivation for studying such as increased peer engagement and self-care activities. Students reported that OL negatively impacted on both their engagement with studies and their mental health, highlighting the need for universities to prioritize supporting their students’ mental health as much as their development of academic skills.
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