Energy Quality Hierarchy and “Transformity” in Evaluation of Product's Working Principles

Development of environmentally friendly products and solutions is becoming a major driver for innovation and product development. In the literature there is neither unified approach nor methodology to establish the ecological value of future product at conceptual level. This is particularly important in cases where new and sustainable alternatives are considered to replace well-established, but environmentally costly products and solutions. In this work a method for estimating “transformity” value of product's working principles is proposed in order to define ecological quality evaluation criteria. Research is based on assumption that “transformity” of product's working principles is also ecological quality criteria that might be used by designers for evaluating product's concept variants in early design stages of product development process.