Assessing and improving sustainability of products during conceptual design

Abstract

Being sustainable is the prime target of most of the companies around the world. According to Brundtland, sustainable development should meet the need of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, whereas sustainability is the ability to fulfill the social, economic, and environmental needs continuously. Sustainable production and consumption are essential for achieving the goal of sustainable development. Production of sustainable products has countless benefits to the society. However, the consumption pattern may lead to significant impacts on the environment. Consumers play a critical role in deciding the consumption pattern. Thus, understanding consumer behavior is essential to improve consumption patterns, whereas production of the sustainable product necessarily involves the designer, who designs the product. Some supports are available in the detailed design phase for the designer to help in sustainable production. However, a product designer must be able to design sustainable products in the conceptual design phase itself. In the conceptual design stage, the flexibility of design modification is high at a lower risk. This research aims to develop support for the designers to help in designing sustainable products during the conceptual design stage. First, we need to understand different stakeholder’s perceptions of a sustainable product. The different stakeholders include consumers, designers, industrialists, environmentalists, policymakers, and media personnel. We analyze a total of 422 responses obtained through an online survey. The sample includes responses from 149 producers, 235 consumers, and 38 participants unfamiliar to sustainability. The analysis of the results explains the stakeholder’s awareness, the source of information, activity, and responsibility towards the sustainable product. It reveals the current situation of awareness, achievability, availability, accessibility, affordability of the sustainable product. The results further reveal the requirement to develop a support for the designers to help them during a sustainable product design process. Additionally, we develop a framework to identify a truly sustainable product, which can be improved in the future. Next, we understand in-depth the kind of support required for a designer during the product design process. A total of six designers were invited to solve two different problems with and without triggers (a method as an inspiration). The problem-solving processes were recorded and transcribed into text. A Triple Bottom Line based video protocol analysis code was made to identify the designer’s focus during the process. The results of protocol analysis reveal that designers are spending more time during idea generation phase to solve the given problems. Further, energy-saving communication tool has been identified for varying design of varying product complexity, and it has also been reported that the designers often do not consider the environment as the prime concern without being asked to do so. It concludes that designers need support in the idea generation phase and considering the environment as a priority. The next objective is to develop a framework which helps designer during the idea generation phase. For this, we create a database of available problem-solving methods and categorize each method into its constituent steps, and then segregate each step that are suitable for improving different stages of a product life cycle. Further, we provide a rank to the steps based on the frequent appearance of the particular steps in different methods. Next, we create a tool with these categorized steps. Further, the database includes TRIZ40 initiatives to support sustainability. Designers can generate methods for various design stages as per their requirements by selecting suitable steps from a pool of steps as searched by the tool. Multiple methods are created to evaluate the tool for method generation. Further, methods were generated to support designers, and the same is used for the evaluation of the sustainability of the generated solutions. All the products are the outcome of some idea converted into sketches, and to make a product sustainable, we need the idea to be sustainable. Thus we need to assess the sustainability of the idea itself before it turns into a product. Literature suggests that there are many methods to assess the sustainability of a product in the detailed design stage; however, there is a lack of methods to assess the sustainability of ideas and sketches in the conceptual design stage. We develop a framework for the sustainability assessment of product sketches. This work presents a methodology to read and convert a product’s image into an analyzable format. Further, the methodology analysis the length, width area and volume of the product sketches and convert it to the actual volume by multiplying with a conversion factor. Further, it converts the volume into mass by multiplying the density based on the material selected from a database. Next, this framework calculates the energy absorbed in production, transportation, and use phase corresponding to the particular material and mass of the component. Next, the methodology finds the CO2 equivalent corresponding to the energy absorbed. We incorporate the above-mentioned frameworks a a tool with an interactive GUI. This tool can be improved by extending the process and material database. The tool further can be used to assess and improve the environmental impact of components.