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To shift towards a sustainable society, lifecycle engineering methodologies addressing the social dimension need to be advanced. A new methodological approach is proposed for manufacturers to address the three dimensions of sustainability. This approach aims to enhance value-in-use of service-based offerings and supports designers with two social indicators and five generally applicable recommendations involving multiple product lives towards a circular economy. For validation, it was applied to the case of a manufacturer of washing machines for European consumer markets. Results show that the approach supports designers to incorporate the social dimension efficiently while improving resource efficiency.

In order to meet the EU's climate and resource efficiency targets, changes in our daily-life behaviours, as well as business models, are urgently necessary. More insights are needed to make real changes based on research with a systems perspective. We developed a system dynamics model to analyse the environmental benefits of a transition from ownership-based to access-based household laundry activities. The model considers demographic, technological and behavioural aspects and thereby assesses the environmental impact of laundry activities. The model is applied to the Swedish as well as the European context and allows crosscountry comparisons. The results indicate a significant potential of the sharing economy. The higher utilisation of shared machines and extended lifespans of the machines can cut greenhouse gas emissions by a third and lower raw material usage overall and lower primary raw material in production due to higher recycling rates. The carbon intensity of the energy mix is a crucial factor for the environmental consequences that arise through changes in energy usage due to sharing economy practices. This case study shows the value of adopting policies that could promote sharing and extended life spans.

Design for sustainability needs to apply a societal perspective. The purpose of this paper is to combine the concept of design fixation with higher levels of analysis. Design fixation is used to describe a blind adherence to known concepts during the design process. It is used mostly at the micro level of design with the focus on the activities of an individual designer or a group of designers. In this paper, design fixation gets conceptually lifted to the levels of the organisation and the institution. We ask how the understanding of design fixation helps to achieve higher resource efficiency. Examples of organisational and institutional design fixations are presented. A System Dynamics model is used to simulate the impacts of design fixation on resource use of a sociotechnical laundry systems. Applying this lens suggests that in order to solve societal design fixations, systemic parameters like infrastructure, business models, or policies need to be considered design parameters. The simulation results show that high-level design fixations can have significant impact on resource use.

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