Toward proactive (eco)design process: modeling information transformations among designers activities

Abstract

To cite this version:Maud Rio, Tatiana Reyes, Lionel Roucoules. Toward proactive (eco)design process: modeling information transformations among designers activities. Journal of Cleaner Production, Elsevier, 2012, 39 (January 2013 The growing number of tools and methods for environmental impact analysis shows the variety of contexts covered by ecodesign. As ecodesign tools are evolving rapidly and manipulating different data, environmental engineers are facing some difficulties to share data efficiently with the current product designers tools. To support this data exchange among software, the capacity of tools to interoperate has been widely improved over the last ten years by software integrations. However, this paper argues that the lack of dynamism and flexibility of those solutions cannot fully face the challenge of designing ecoeffective products. Therefore, this paper proposes a three-step method to build dynamic information exchanges between environmental engineers and product designers activities involved along the design process. This proposal can be adapted to the various ecodesign contexts encountered during the design process. It also gives the capacity to the environmental engineer to use any available information produced by other designers and to give them back an adapted answer to reiterate their choices. In this paper, the proposal has been tested on an industrial case study. The results are used to discuss the benefits of developing such a method in the industry to build a constant proactivity along the design process between the environmental engineer and product designers.

Toward an systemic navigation framework to integrate sustainable development into the company

“…CAD Outputs) and the source model (e.g. LCA Inputs) (Rio et al, 2013). In the computer sciences, integration and unification are both interoperability approaches using a standard format (such as STEP, XML) to support data exchanges.…”

“…Nevertheless, literature does not present any clear example of a wide variety of tools (not only LCA) that could be used along the design process in a federative approach, nor the possible connections between the various product designers' activities and the various environmental tools, in a systemic perspective of changing contexts (given by managers). Lastly, although federation shows great potential to improve the deployment of environmental tools on the operational level when designing products, there are still some weaknesses regarding the way of measuring this improvement in order to dynamically adjust operational-level resources to tactical and strategic levels (Rio et al, 2013).…”

“…The integration of environmental parameters (as well as socioeconomical parameters) into the designer's activities can be facilitated by this proposal (Rio et al, 2013). One of the difficulties encountered in the operational module is indeed to give capacity to local designers to take into account the environmental parameter when performing their activity.…”

Integration of Environmental Assessment in a PLM Context: A Case Study in Luxury Industry

“…So LCA cannot be properly used in the early stages of design phases where many alternatives are studied and product lifecycle data are incomplete. To enable early application as well as to improve overall use of LCA within design, less complex and data demanding, Simplified Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) have been developed [9,13,23]. The simplification is related to data reduction either by excluding a lifecycle stage (use or end of life) and/or by reducing the complexity of the Life Cycle Inventory [7].…”

“…Designers have some difficulties to interpret the environmental results and to identify the product improvement areas [22]. This can be due to the lack of correlation between the environmental impacts and the product designer parameters such as material or manufacturing process [23]. If designers cannot use the method or interpret its results, the product cannot be eco-designed.…”