Integrating Sustainable Development and Design-Thinking-Based Product Design

Abstract

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.

Cultivating Design Thinking for Sustainable Business Transformation in a VUCA World: Insights from a German Case Study

“…In any case, it could be observed that ensuring a common sustainable direction happens in the seed stage, even before cultivating the needed Dynamic Design Thinking capabilities; see Figure 5. This corresponds with the recommendations from research that sustainable development must be integrated into the entire business process "rather than merely adding 'sustainability' as an additional need" [29]. that ensuring a common sustainable direction happens in the seed stage, even before cultivating the needed Dynamic Design Thinking capabilities; see Figure 5.…”

“…This notion can also be reflected for the innovation of sustainable solutions. While researchers recognize the potential of Design Thinking to innovate sustainable solutions, they note that Design Thinking only leads to sustainable product and service innovations within a sustainable framework [29,30]. With this regard, the idea of ecodesign, "a systematic approach, which considers environmental aspects in design and development with the aim to reduce adverse environmental impacts throughout the life cycle of a product" [31] is gaining importance as a concept that, in combination with Design Thinking, leads to sustainable innovation of solutions.…”

Presentation and Evaluation of a New Graduate Unit of Study in Engineering Product Development

“…Similarly, it is not a new idea that engineering education has a key role to play in equipping engineers with the design skills that they need to contribute to national competitiveness [3]. Owing to the importance of sustainable development in society and business [4,5], it is also clear that quality engineering education in product development has a key role to play. In addition to fundamental knowledge in maths, science, and engineering, experience of the engineering design process and the experience of realistic engineering design problems is an important aspect of engineering education.…”