Using a Product’s Sustainability Space as a Design Exploration Tool

Abstract

Sustainable design is often practiced and assessed through the consideration of three essential areas: economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, and social sustainability. For even the simplest of products, the complexities of these three areas and their tradeoffs cause decision-making transparency to be lost in most practical situations. The existing field of multiobjective optimization offers a natural framework to define and explore a given design space. In this paper, a method for defining a product’s sustainability space (defined by economic, environmental, and social sustainability objectives) is outlined and used to explore the tradeoffs within the space, thus offering both the design team and the decision makers a means of better understanding the sustainability tradeoffs. This paper concludes that sustainable product development can indeed benefit from tradeoff characterization using multiobjective optimization techniques – even when using only basic models of sustainability. Interestingly, the unique characteristics of the three essential sustainable development areas lead to an alternative view of some traditional multiobjective optimization concepts, such as weak-Pareto optimality. The sustainable redesign of a machine to drill boreholes for water wells is presented as a practical example for method demonstration and discussion.

A computational simulation-based framework for estimating potential product impact during product design

“…The social impact of a product can be defined as its influence on a person's day-today life (Burdge 2015). All products have a social impact, and the effect can be positive or negative (Norman & MacDonald 2004;Mattson et al 2019). This social impact can happen during the development, production, use and end-of-life phases of products.…”

Where do professionals find sustainability and innovation value? Empirical tests of three sustainable design methods

“…Previous empirical studies on sustainable design have usually studied individual methods in isolation (Devanathan et al 2010;Uang & Liu 2013;Reap & Bras 2014;Tempelman et al 2015;Arlitt et al 2017;Mattson et al 2019) or considered all sustainable design practices as the same (see first paragraph citations). Some have compared whole design methods to each other (Behrisch, Ramirez & Giurco 2011a;Behrisch, Ramirez & Giurco 2011b).…”

Can the choice of eco-design principles affect products’ success?

“…The improvement of environmental performance is not seldom combined with the worsening of other characteristics, well perceived by customers (Luchs, Brower & Chitturi 2012). Similarly, Mattson et al (2019) highlight the complexity of achieving environmental benefits in design without jeopardizing the economic and social dimensions of sustainability. According to D' Anna & Cascini (2016), an increase of product cost is likely to take place to safeguard overall product performance when eco-design is in play.…”

“…Similarly, Mattson et al. (2019) highlight the complexity of achieving environmental benefits in design without jeopardizing the economic and social dimensions of sustainability. According to D’Anna & Cascini (2016), an increase of product cost is likely to take place to safeguard overall product performance when eco-design is in play.…”