Print Email Facebook Twitter Nature inspired design: Strategies towards sustainability Title Nature inspired design: Strategies towards sustainability Author De Pauw, I.C. Kandachar, P.V. Karana, E. Peck, D.P. Wever, R. Faculty Industrial Design Engineering Date 2010-10-28 Abstract Current design practices focus on eco-efficiency as the main approach in the field of sustainable product development. This approach mainly aims at improving existing products and services. Environmental product performance can be greatly improved using ecoefficiency but in many cases the improvements are incremental. Furthermore, the overall environmental impact the product causes is often not reducing, but rising instead. Strategies based on ‘learning from nature’ - Biomimicry, Natural Capitalism and Cradle to Cradle- offer opportunities to design in a radically different, goal-driven manner. These strategies, which are introduced in this paper as ‘nature-inspired design strategies’, provide pathways and principles aimed at developing designs that are in natural balance with their environment. Common principles include the use of materials in closed loops and using solar driven energy systems. Implementing these strategies is expected to have large impacts on the business processes, on the design of products, and on the type & amount of materials used. However, clear and tested methods for designers to apply these strategies in sustainable product development are lacking. This position paper explores and analyses nature-inspired design strategies from the perspective of sustainable product development. The main aim is to define the research work, to explore how these strategies can be applied in the design business for developing radically-sustainable products. Conclusions are drawn to facilitate the construction of the research design. Subject sustainable product developmentnature-inspired design strategiesbiomimicrycradle to cradlenatural capitalism To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:034f9375-e61a-4a55-b15b-22257f21fb26 ISBN 9789051550658 Source Knowledge Collaboration & Learning for Sustainable Innovation: ERSCP-EMSU Conference, 25-29 October 2010, Delft, The Netherlands Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type conference paper Rights (c) 2010 The Author(s) Files PDF 352_Pauw.pdf 419.5 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:034f9375-e61a-4a55-b15b-22257f21fb26/datastream/OBJ/view