A Method for Understanding Sustainable Design Trade-Offs During the Early Design Phase

Wisthoff, Addison; DuPont, Bryony

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-32098-4_24

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Easy-to-implement SDMTs are often based on generalized rules of thumb rather than precise data, making their guidance questionable [44]. These easier SDMTs still suffer from a lack of clear actionable recommendations: general principles such as "eliminate toxicity" can be difficult to apply when qualifying options are rare or unknown, and complex tradeoffs must often be made between energy use, resource consumption, toxicity, and social impacts [45]. This makes simple vague guidelines harder to implement despite their simplicity, and can hamper substantive sustainability improvements.…”

Section: Rq2: What Improvements In Sdmts Would Most Drive Industry Fomentioning

confidence: 99%

A Research Roadmap for Sustainable Design Methods and Tools

et al. 2020

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Sustainable design methods and tools abound, but their implementation in practice remains marginal. This article brings together results from previous literature reviews and analyses of sustainable design methods and tools, as well as input from design researchers and professional practitioners to identify the needs and gaps in the area. It results in a shared vision of how sustainable design methods and tools can be more tightly integrated into mainstream product design and development, as well as the current state of practice and research in relation to four central questions: What are the needs and values of industry regarding sustainable design? What improvements in sustainable design methods and tools would most drive industry forward? How should researchers move forward with developing more useful sustainable design methods and tools? How can sustainable design be more effectively integrated into industry? A roadmap for the international sustainable design research community is proposed with descriptions of short-, medium-, and long-term tasks for addressing each question. The purpose is to support collective progress and discussions on method and tool development and adoption, and to enable more tangible success in mainstreaming sustainable design practices in industry.

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Section: Rq2: What Improvements In Sdmts Would Most Drive Industry Fomentioning

confidence: 99%

A Research Roadmap for Sustainable Design Methods and Tools

et al. 2020

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“…Some industries have industry-specific conceptual design techniques. For example, chemical engineering process design researchers have presented a hierarchical conceptual design process [82], and sustainable product designer researchers have presented a tool called the "GREEn Quiz" to improve the understanding of design trade-offs during the early design phases [83]. WEC designers might benefit from WEC-specific conceptual design techniques.…”

Section: Concept Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Wave Energy Converter Design Process: Methods Applied in Industry and Shortcomings of Current Practices

Trueworthy

DuPont

2020

JMSE

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Wave energy is among the many renewable energy technologies being researched and developed to address the increasing demand for low-emissions energy. The unique design challenges for wave energy converter design—integrating complex and uncertain technological, economic, and ecological systems, overcoming the structural challenges of ocean deployment, and dealing with complex system dynamics—have lead to a disjointed progression of research and development. There is no common design practice across the wave energy industry and there is no published synthesis of the practices that are used by developers. In this paper, we summarize the methods being employed in WEC design as well as promising methods that have yet to be applied. We contextualize these methods within an overarching design process. We present results from a survey of WEC developers to identify methods that are common in industry. From the review and survey results, we conclude that the most common methods of WEC design are iterative methods in which design parameters are defined, evaluated, and then changed based on evaluation results. This leaves a significant space for improvement of methods that help designers make better-informed decisions prior to sophisticated evaluation, and methods of using the evaluation results to make better design decisions during iteration. Despite the popularity of optimization methods in academic research, they are less common in industry development. We end this paper with a summary of the areas of WEC design in which the testing and development of new methods is necessary, and where more research is required to fully understand the influence of design decisions on WEC performance.

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“…These guidelines are taken from the GREEn Quiz, an online design tool that provides a preliminary analysis of environmental sustainability of a product concept [30]. Table 1 lists the 47 products used in the initiation of the SDR.…”

Section: Initialization Of the Sustainable Design Repositorymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Sustainable Design Repository for Influencing the Eco-Design of New Consumer Products

Ferrero¹,

Wisthoff²,

Huynh³

et al. 2017

Preprint

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Engineering designers are constantly seeking ways to be more innovative, decisive, and informed of emerging technologies in the design of consumer products. Design tools, such as functional decomposition, morphology, and Pugh charts help stimulate the design process. However, many earlydesign-phase design tools require designers to have experiential or empirical design knowledge; many of these approaches are intractable for use by novice designers or designers with little experience designing for certain new objectives. In contrast to these current tools, using repositories to store product design information can provide additional and extensive design knowledge to the global design community. Using repository data-and resultant data-driven design approaches-in the design of new products can be especially impactful for DfX design objectives such as product sustainability, about which many engineering designers have limited knowledge. In this paper, we discuss the creation of a sustainable design repository -a collection of product data that includes environmental impact information. Through the initialization of a 47-product repository case study, we seek to create data-driven design processes that can influence designers to consider environmental sustainability. We found, for example, that in the first year of a product's life, 29-64% of the environmental impact occurs during the product's use phase, and that uncertainty in input data (such as component manufacturing location and disposal method) can significantly contribute to environmental impact variation. The creation of this sustainable design repository highlights the need for the consideration of input uncertainties when conducting environmental impact analysis. Additionally, the repository has also been used in tandem with machine learning to understand design decisions that lead to more sustainable products. This sustainable design repository enables subsequent data-driven design research in that it provides a large dataset on which machine learning approaches can operate.

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A Method for Understanding Sustainable Design Trade-Offs During the Early Design Phase

Cited by 4 publications

References 13 publications

A Research Roadmap for Sustainable Design Methods and Tools

A Research Roadmap for Sustainable Design Methods and Tools

The Wave Energy Converter Design Process: Methods Applied in Industry and Shortcomings of Current Practices

A Sustainable Design Repository for Influencing the Eco-Design of New Consumer Products

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