The role of human factors in the adoption of sustainable design criteria in business

Implementing sustainability in business is steadily gaining more attention. A growing number of companies currently work on the implementation of sustainable criteria in the design related departments and their design processes. Although theory and methods are available, practice shows that this integration process of sustainability criteria is...

Clothing design for promoting sustainable use: Social and technical durability

Many life cycle assessment studies document that the most resource demanding phase during the clothing life cycle is the use period. This paper discusses how to reduce the environmental impacts of clothing use by improved design. Complete systems thinking is required, evaluating contributions by all the actors in the clothes’ life cycle chain....

Sustainable, user behaviour centered design applying linked-benefit strategies: The Logi Desk Lamp

Design for sustainable behaviour implies applying design strategies that have been proposed to realize sustainable products that take into account human behavior, thereby minimizing user-related environmental losses. In addition, the application of linked-benefit strategies has been suggested to ensure the design of commercially interesting...

When to apply different design for sustainable behaviour strategies

Increased focus in research on the environmental consequences of behaviour and product usage the last decade has resulted in a number of different design strategies. The strategies are meant to stimulate desired behavioural patterns or to avoid undesired ones. Although this provides understanding of how behaviour may be changed, there has been...

Sustainability in Design Engineering Education; Experiences in Northern Europe

In recent years, the implementation of sustainability into the curricula of engineering has become increasingly important. This paper focuses on the experiences of integrating sustainability in Design Engineering education in the academic bachelor programs at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, at the University College of West...

The commoditization of consumer electronics products and its influence on packaging design

The traditional purpose of packaging for consumer electronics (CE) products was to get them in one piece from the factory to the consumers home. It was purely focused on the physical distribution. In that time, buying a CE product could be considered a major family investment. However, times have changed, as nowadays a trend of commoditization...

Packaging for consumer electronic products: The need for integrating design and engineering

From the perspective of a multinational corporation producing durable consumer goods sustainable packaging is packaging that fulfils the right functionalities in the most efficient way. In order to achieve this, an integral design process is required. Such an integral approach to the design of packaging for CE goods would imply a process that...

Design for Sustainability in the Fuzzy Front End

Design for Sustainability has traditionally focused strongly on green fulfilment of a given function, i.e. the process after a design brief has been formulated. The part of the New Product Development process that comes before the formulation of the design brief, is usually referred to as the Fuzzy Front End. Here, the function is determined...

Design for volume reduction

Traditionally packaging design-for-sustainability (DfS) strongly focuses on resource conservation and material recycling. The type and amount of materials used has been the driver in design. For consumer electronics (CE) products this weight-based approach is too limited; a volume-based approach is needed. As this paper will show, from an...

Sustainable Product Design, Engineering and Management Education for Industrial Design Engineering

Developments in the field of sustainable product design are manifold, which means that education in this field is rapidly evolving as well. In this paper, the continuously evolving portfolio of courses offered at Delft University of Technology’s Industrial Design Engineering faculty is systematically discussed, with a focus on content, course...

Balancing Environmental Performance with Sales Functionalities in Packaging for Consumer Electronic Products

Two major changes are currently taking place in the world of Consumer Electronics. They are, first, the relocation of production to low-wage countries, in particularly China. This results in longer distribution distances, which lead to a higher relative importance of this phase in the entire life cycle. To make this phase as efficient as...