Group Model Building With Causal Loop Diagrams to Foster Capabilities for Sustainable Design and Product Development

Abstract

This research proposes a group model building workshop method that uses causal loop diagrams to foster capabilities for sustainable product development based on feedback and observations from several cases. The method's potential to enhance sustainability system thinking skills and to identify relationships between sustainability criteria and traditionally identified requirements is evaluated. The method can trigger discussion, visualize complexity and dependencies of sustainable design problems. Other application areas are e.g., sustainability training for practicing engineers and students.

Using Group Model Building to Foster Learning for Strategic Sustainable Development

“…At the end of the workshop, participants shared their new learnings, together with discovered opportunities and challenges to meet both sustainability criteria and the traditional requirements. In this way, the participants were triggered to unravel conflicting perceptions and co-create a model in which their new system models of relationships and dependencies between sustainability criteria and product requirements were illustrated [30].…”

“…In research and education within the scope of the FSSD, GMB has been applied in different research areas such as sustainable product development [30,31], sustainable mobility [32], and in higher education [33][34][35]. Based on the secondary data retrieved from these cases, the following subsections provide case summaries and analyses against the proposed reference model.…”