Sustainable Product Design Education: Current Practice

Current production and consumption patterns are unsustainable, causing irreversible damage to the environment and human health and well-being. Designers play a vital role in resolving this problem—their decisions affect product manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal—and hence they must be aware of the positive and negative impacts of...

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

Recommendations of sustainable design methods are usually based on theory, not empirical industry tests. Furthermore, since professionals often mix components of different design methods, recommending whole methods may not be relevant. It may be better to recommend component activities or mindsets. To provide empirical grounding for...

The redesign of CPAP supplies for the Circular Economy: A product service system as a modular solution

The business wide objective of Philips regarding the transition to the circular economy is among others, that 15% of the total revenue should be from circular revenue from products and services by 2020.Patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome use a CPAP machine at home to keep their airways open during sleep. The Sleep & Respiratory...

Eco-Design in Lean Startups: Tools for the Discovery of Benefits for Startups in Practicing Eco-Design

The aim of this project is to bring more eco-design into business practices. The specific approach to this project is to bring eco-design methods to startup with an introduction via the Lean Startup method. With the help of input of startup founders, a solution has been found in the form of an opportunity identification tool. This tool allows...

Enhancing eco-engineering of coastal infrastructure with eco-design: Moving from mitigation to integration

Eco-design aims to enhance eco-engineering practices of coastal infrastructure projects in support of ecological functions before these projects are developed and implemented. The principle is to integrate eco-engineering concepts in the early phases of project design. Although ecological losses are inherent in any construction project, the...

From Smartphone to Futurephone: Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Different Circular Economy Scenarios of a Smartphone Using LCA

The lack of literature on using life cycle assessment (LCA) for increasing environmental performance raises the need for concepts or eco-design tools to be combined with LCA to answer the question of how to strategize and take actions based on LCA results. This study intends to address this need by using mobile phones as a case study and...

Assessment of sustainability in product design at BK cookware

BK (Berk Kampen) is a Dutch company part of the Royal Delft Group, which in the past 160 years has grown into a cookware brand that combines high quality with ease of use and prize-winning design. BK wants to deliver both convenience and inspiration for cooking through good products, specially developed for the needs of users through...

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...

A Culture-Inspired Approach to Gaining Insights for Designing Sustainable Practices

This paper explores a design method to generate insights for designing less resource-intensive forms of everyday life. This study takes the assumption that looking at cultural diversity can widen the variety of insights which can be used as a source of inspiration for designing sustainable practices. However, there is a lack of clear-cut...

A Culture-Inspired Approach to Designing Sustainable Practice: A study of sustainable bathing practice for the Living Lab project

Introduction: This study explores a method to designing less resource-intensive forms of everyday life. The method is geared toward the early phase of product development, which is the generation of insights and design ideas. Looking at daily behavior, one can observe clear differences between different cultures. From this observation, the study...

Environmental Information for Industrial Designers