Introducing Sustainability in Value Models to Support Design Decision Making: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Abstract:Manufacturing organizations shall recognize sustainability as a business occasion to capitalize on, rather than an undesirable pressing situation. Still, empirical evidence shows that such an opportunity is hard to capture and communicate in global strategic decisions, through planning by tactical management, to daily operational activities. This paper systematically reviews the modelling challenges at the cross-road of value and sustainability decisions making, spotlighting methods and tools proposed in literature to link sustainability to customer value creation at strategic, tactical and operational level. While statistical results show that the topic of sustainability and value modeling is trending in literature, findings from content analysis reveal that recent attempts to promote a value-based view in the sustainability discussion remains at a strategic level, with most of the proposed indicators being suited for managerial decision-making. The lack of support at operational level points to the opportunity of cross-pollinating sustainability research with value-centered methodologies originating from the aerospace sector. The Value Driven Design framework is proposed as main hub from which to derive models supporting engineers and technology developers in the identification of win-win-win situations, where sustainable improvements are aligned with business advantages.

Investigating effects of group model building on sustainable design decision-making

“…Another measurement than the average KM value might provide a more accurate representation of the effect on KM since the different levels of KM constitute a Likert scale, in which the extreme values tend to be avoided by questionnaire respondents (Theofanidis & J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f Fountouki, 2018). A follow-up study in which all teams use the same set of MDOs and LSC could also compare the effect on KM in more detail than was possible in this study where each team used their unique set, for instance (Bertoni et al, 2015). However, even though CAUSAL cannot claim to have increased the average KM values, the participants still appreciated the discussion around maturity.…”

“…CAUSAL combines CLD with a visualization scheme and guiding questions to trigger an in-depth discussion about the impacts and implications of sustainability in the given design context. A visualization scheme, inspired by (Bertoni et al, 2015;Johansson et al, 2011), complements the standard arrows and symbols in traditional CLD scripts (Wilkerson et al, 2020) and is used to encourage an in-depth and critical discussion and to generate a visual and documented decision support (Gallopín et al, 2014). Traditional CLD symbols are, e.g., dashed arrows indicating opposite (-) influence on the related variable, and whole arrows indicate influence in the same direction.…”

What's the catch? Trade-off challenges in early design for sustainability

“…In trade-offs, one must prioritise between different criteria or define acceptable levels of compromise (Bigolin et al, 2021;Harivardhini et al, 2017;Thurston and Srinivasan, 2003;Vargas-Berrones et al, 2020). Decision makers might be reluctant to assign explicit weights to criteria (Abbas, 2015), and customers might have very different perceptions (Angelo and Marujo, 2020;Bertoni et al, 2015;Shiu, 2015).…”

Value Driven Design Revisited: Emerging Modelling Concepts and Applications

“…This means that the system boundaries need to expand to include a wider set of stakeholders and, in more extreme cases, the society and the planet at large. In this looser interpretation of boundaries', value models shall support the design team in identifying solutions that do not only maximise customer satisfaction while reducing the providers' cost, but that are also beneficial for both people and environment (Bertoni 2017). There is also an effort to include a "servitization" perspective and circular economy thinking in the value modelling activity, extending the boundaries of the system to be considered in the VDD exercise (Isaksson et al, 2016).…”