Many entrepreneurial businesses have attempted to create value based on the residual material streams of third parties. Based on ‘waste’ materials they designed products, around which they built their company. Such activities have the potential to yield sustainable products. Many of such companies remain in the more artistic domain, with relatively labor-intensive products, and small batch sizes. Moving beyond such small-scale activities would likely require a standardized innovation process. The design process for such residual material stream-based products, however, is somewhat different than regular mainstream industrial design engineering methodology. In this paper, a case study is presented based on one such company, with a portfolio of over 20 products, ranging from home & furnishing to kitchen & food services and ranging from office & work to event products. Based on historical projects, success factors for successful design with residual materials are determined. Results show, first of all, that particular attention needs to be paid to the consumer & market side of potential new projects. Second, products aren’t automatically more sustainable, hence attention needs to be paid to ensure that resulting products are sustainable. Third, sourcing of residual material streams is of the utmost importance. Finally, manufacturing with residual materials provides an additional challenge. The resulting design approach is subsequently tested in a real-life project for an external client, substantiating the findings of the analysis of historical projects.
In the two last decades a considerable amount of research has been conducted on the Front End of Innovation. This is the stage of the product development process where the design brief is formulated. This phase is argued to be crucial to the success of the final product. While the Front End of Innovation in general has been a hot research topic, little research has been conducted on its relationship to design for sustainability. Indeed, within Design-for-Sustainability literature a strong focus can be observed on the phase after the formulation of the design brief. Many companies hire external design agencies for their product innovation. In such collaborations, goals and targets for the design project need to be clarified in the early stages of the project, including sustainability targets. The role of design agencies in design for sustainability is also under-researched. This paper discusses the potential of sustainability as a value-adding activity for design agencies. It explores how design agencies deal with sustainability issues in the Front End of Innovation. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with five major Dutch design agencies. Findings show that a distinction can be made between incorporation of sustainability as a consequence of a client request (i.e. client-driven sustainability) and when sustainability is incorporated into the project by the agency (i.e. agency-driven sustainability). Also, agencies appear to deal with sustainability on a decomposed level. This study has initiated an array of follow-up studies, which are sketched in the further research section.
Sustainable innovation comes in many forms and sizes. There are different philosophies about how to design, such as EcoDesign, bio-mimicry and Cradle-to-cradle. There are differences in organizational contexts, such as multinationals, small and medium sized enterprises, start-ups and design agencies. Furthermore, different product categories and/or industries are suited to different approaches. What leads to a successful and sustainable innovation in one particular context need not necessarily work in the next. In order to make students fully aware of these strategic choices, a module was developed within the taught master’s program of Integrated Product Design at Delft University of Technology, aiming at teaching students to perform a stakeholder analysis and a driver analysis for a given innovation project, in light of sustainability, and to empower students to discuss how sustainable innovation manifests itself differently in different organizational contexts, and to communicate about sustainable innovation using business language. The course ran successfully with 120 students. Participants were required to submit weekly reflections on a diverse range of scientific and non-scientific materials. Assessment was based on a scientific case study written on a unique and self-chosen historical sustainable innovation, and a single blind peer-review executed on the work of fellow students. This paper discusses the chosen set-up of the course, with the didactical substantiation. It also highlights pointers for other educators how want to apply similar teaching methods. The paper further discusses how this set-up allowed connecting ongoing research by senior researchers and PhD candidates to the taught master’s program.
European ecodesign policy is currently bringing material resource efficiency into focus. This paper explores how and to what extent policy addresses sustainable consumption-related issues, and what the consequences may be for the future role of design in supporting sustainable everyday consumption. How will policy help and hinder designers and others in creating change? The paper focuses on the prospects for practice-oriented design, which sees resource consumption as happening in and for the sake of social practices. It first introduces design for sustainable practices as currently explored in academia, highlighting features that distinguish it from ecodesign. Secondly, it turns to policy to describe and assess relevant instruments and envisaged changes. Based on that, and informed by practice theory and literature on the impact of policy on innovation, it discusses the potential impact of ecodesign policy on the prospects for design for sustainable practices. Finally, the paper turns the question around and asks what a practice-oriented policy might look like.
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 approaches for collecting information on sustainable everyday practices from multiple cultures. Therefore, this study explores: 1) how to collect information about resource-consuming everyday practice from different cultures, and 2) what kinds of insights can be gained from this information. An experimental culture survey was conducted. The survey had the practice ‘bathing’ as the central topic, and featured three countries; the Netherlands, Japan and India. The results suggest that a self-observation probe with a feature of recording the practice by a set of elements was successful in collecting information from users in three countries. From this information, three types of insights were generated, which are expected to be useful in the context of designing sustainable practices. These are: 1) different styles of bathing and their respective resource consumption, 2) relations between the contextual elements and 3) particular actions which have a considerable impact on the total resource consumption.
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-Flanders in Belgium, and at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The different approaches are described and discussed. This paper aims to share insights and lessons learned in how to accomplish true integration of sustainability in bachelor course curricula of Industrial Design Engineering.
This paper describes a method for insight generation for sustainable innovations. The method takes a practice oriented approach aiming for product ideas for practice level innovations. The method was applied in a case study on the practice of bathing. Insights on sustainable bathing innovations were gathered during a two-week period in which sixteen participants were asked to create and execute their own experiment for less resource intensive ways of bathing at home. In a group session these insights were translated into product ideas. It was concluded that it is indeed possible to generate product ideas with a practice oriented approach. The experiments in the home context helped the participants to come up with practice level bathing innovations. As predicted, they turned out to have potential to yield strong reductions in resource consumption and compete with the currently dominant practice of daily showering.
Despite the many existing Eco-design methods and tools, their use is still limited. When they are used, these methods and tools are often not integrated in the product development process. The purp ...
This paper reviews research into Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS). These are intermediary products that can visualize, manage, and/or monitor the energy use of other products or whole households. HEMS have lately received increasing attention for their possible role in conserving energy within households. However, an analysis of the problem areas within household energy consumption along with a review of case studies and commercially available HEMS reveals some research gaps. If HEMS are to become truly effective, future research needs to focus on improving longitudinal effects and studying the influence of design.
In Today’s society there are a wide variety of floor and floor materials. An extensive range of products and methods are also used to ensure that these floors remain functional. All floor types and ...
The purpose of this study was to investigate how work with Lean and environmental aspects affect one another, and if possible and beneficial from a business point-of-view, how they could be integra ...
New interfaces to the energy system can facilitate changes of habits and provide means to control the household’s use of energy. In this paper, we look at energy use and such interfaces in the home ...
This paper presents a neural network (NN) approach for determining the design combination of product form elements that match a given eco-product value (EPV) and product image. A morphological analysis is used to extract form elements from these sample office chairs. The experimental study identifies 7 office chair design elements and 27 representative office chairs as experimental samples for developing NN models. A best-performing NN model is chosen to examine the complex relationship between 7 design elements and 6 product images as well as 15 EPV attributes which are identified and categorized into aesthetic, functional, and environmental dimensions. With the NN model, an office chair design database is built consisting of 960 different combinations of design elements, together with their associated EPV and product image values. The application of the database provides product designers with the best combination of product form elements for illustrating the aesthetic, functional, and environmental-friendly attributes as well as particular design concept represented by product image word pairs to an office chair design, thus facilitating the eco-product form deign process.
