Enhancing knowledge exchange and collaboration between craftspeople and designers using the concept of boundary objects

Design and craft domains possess knowledge and experiences that are valuable to product development; however, such knowledge is often tacit, localized, and embedded within each respective domain. In this paper, we examine how a combination of design tools—prescribed as boundary objects—supports knowledge exchange and collaboration between...

Comparing Performance of Biomass Gasifier Stoves: Influence of a Multi-Context Approach

Millions of people worldwide die prematurely or suffer from severe health ailments due to cooking equipment that causes unhealthy doses of (household) air pollution. Many attempts to address this have fallen short because technology was not improved sufficiently or the way it was introduced constituted an ill fit with the broader “cooking eco...

Influence of Context Variation on Quality of Solutions: Experiences with Gasifier Stoves

Many global sustainable development issues affect large numbers of people, e.g. clean cooking. Most current projects focus on a specific use context, therefore do not scale well to new contexts and consequently do not reach enough beneficiaries. We present an approach, Context Variation by Design (CVD), in which insights from different contexts...

Future living studio: Socio-technical experiments in sustainable design

Local creative community and design engineers are key stakeholders in initiating a local discourse on sustainability that includes considerations of production and consumption issues. The role of designers is increasingly changing to that of a strategic or facilitator role. Aligned with this global development, we developed Future Living Studio ...

From community resilience towards urban resilience: Exploring the grassroot initiatives' role in cities

Climate change and resource scarcity effects pose challenges by themselves. In the context of the complexity of cities, these challenges become wicked and ill-defined as e.g. socialeconomic issues are added. To face these challenges, a city’s resilience on multiple scales has to enable it to both mitigate the causes and adapt to the...

Engaging households in sustainable renovation: Exploration of a complementary approach

One of the major challenges for sustainable resource use lies in the renovation of the existing building stock. Less than 1% of the total building stock in North-West Europe is renewed each year, which means that most gain has to be achieved by renovation of the existing building stock in combination with changes in behaviour by residents, the...

Partnerships for sustainable design in Vietnam: Leveraging culture and design

This paper discusses need and relevance of new local-global collaborations for sustainable design. Future Living Studio is a case study that explores how to enable cross-cultural collaboration in Vietnam towards addressing sustainable design and production issues. This paper presents the first empirical results of a diary study supplemented by...

A product innovation toolkit for green business in South East Asia

Most of the available Sustainable Product Innovation (SPI) approaches and tools have been developed in Western Europe, based upon European experiences. However, in South-East Asian economies like Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, needs are different and more immediate. Also the characteristics of the local companies and product innovation approaches...

Designers as change agents in emerging economies - An insider-outsider approach to collaborative product development with Vietnamese smes

This paper, written for the doctoral colloquium of IASDR 2011, calls for explicit consideration of ethics and culture in design for emerging economies. A theoretical framework combining collaborative stakeholder approaches with insider-outsider dialectics is proposed as a way to operationalize the ethical element of sustainable development...

Promoting academia-industry cooperation for innovation

Innovation and Innovation Management are essential instruments and methodologies to manage the changes that society and its productive sector are facing in order to find the right balance between competitiveness, trade demands, social equity and sustainable development. A clear role in this can be played by the local universities and by an...

Towards a more resilient built environment

Over time, humankind’s lifestyle became increasingly dependent on finite resources. It follows that such a system is unable to sustain itself indefinitely. Several studies show that in the near future the climate may radically change and oil production will peak. Changes in the natural environment will possibly be so overwhelming that man has to...

A social approach to energy metering: The energy mentor

Industrial designers are used to applying their skills to modify or change user’s behaviour, inducing attributes to the product to empower/inhibit the use into a certain direction (e.g. scripts). These approaches might bring the desired results, and modify behaviour to one that favors sustainability. Such approaches, however, have a major defect...

Towards a more resilient built environment

Over time, humankind’s lifestyle became increasingly dependent on finite resources. It follows that such a system is unable to sustain itself indefinitely. Several studies show that in the near future the climate may radically change and oil production will peak. Changes in the natural environment will possibly be so overwhelming that man has to...

Design for sustainability: Current trends in sustainable product design development

The Design for Sustainability (D4S) concept outlines methodologies for making sustainable improvements (social, economic and environmental) to products by applying elements of life cycle thinking. D4S builds on the work of ecodesign to include economic and social concerns, and its methodology includes both incremental and radical innovation. The...

Ecodesign in Central America

This PhD thesis describes and analyses the change process started by the Ecodesign project in Central America, executed between 1998 and 2002. The project started using the concept and praxis developed in Europe. Nine ecodesign projects were performed in industry, and ecodesign was introduced to counterpart organisations. With these first...