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The increase in manufactured products has progressively generated industrial waste and, thus, the post-consumption waste, which is not adequately disposed of. Regulation and sustainability strategies have been considered as a solution to this problem, in which social, environmental and economic gains have been the main goals. Sustainability issues integrated into the main businesses and operations within the supply chain have been considered in all stages of product design to make them more sustainable. Hence, this study aimed to describe the current state of the art regarding Sustainable Design and Reverse Logistics integration, to identify the potential factors that allow for this combination and report the challenges and opportunities by means of a systematic literature review. We elaborated a systematic review protocol, which stated the inclusion and exclusion criteria for selecting publications regarding the integration between Sustainable Design and Reverse Logistics, from 2008 to 2017 and considered ten research questions as guidelines to collect information from the selected papers. Our final sample comprised of 19 papers and we verified that there are several gaps regarding the integration of the two concepts since most of the research considered indirect integration relations and they do not account for Reverse Logistics activities at the end of the product's life cycle. Therefore, we proposed three frameworks that highlight this integration and expands the Design for Reverse Logistics perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of circular products is gaining relevance among academics, practitioners, and industry as a critical step to face material scarcity, the unsustainability of industrial processes, and excessive waste generation. Therefore, product design is a powerful research field to promote material, component, and product circularity throughout several lifecycles. However, there is a lack of formal methods to measure the circularity of products, especially from the early design stages. Therefore, this paper proposes a diagnostic tool for measuring circularity, identifying potential improvement opportunities, and redesigning interventions in the conceptual design phase. The tool consists of eight single indicators that measure disassemblability, reassemblability, durability, modularity, simplicity, standardization, commonality, relative costs, and the number of secondary functions of products. A case study is presented to validate the tool, considering several improvement scenarios around the 6R strategies. Finally, a list of redesign interventions for each improvement scenario was assembled as a primary output of the proposed tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As global resources deplete, there has emerged a need for designers to emphasize sustainability in engineering design. Several researchers have proposed design tools to support sustainable design; however, designers must be sufficiently motivated to actively adopt a sustainable design mindset and utilize these design tools. Prior research has identified the need for interpersonal skills (e.g., empathy, pro-environmental attitudes, and intentions) among individuals to encourage an active sustainable mindset. While researchers have demonstrated the relationship between designers' empathy and their identification of problem requirements in design, little research has explored this relationship in the context of sustainable design. Moreover, little research has investigated this relationship with a focus on novice designers. Our aim in this paper is to explore this research gap through an experimental study with 40 undergraduate engineering students. Specifically, we investigated the relationship between novice designers' trait empathy, their beliefs, attitudes, and intentions towards environmental sustainability, and their identification of problem requirements. From the results, we see that participants' empathic concern—a component of trait empathy—correlated positively with their attitudes and intentions towards sustainability. Additionally, participants' beliefs, attitudes, and intentions towards sustainability significantly predicted their identification of environment-focused problem requirements, with their intentions towards sustainable action demonstrating the strongest positive relationship. Finally, we see that although components of participants' trait empathy did not significantly predict their identification of problem requirements, participants' score on fantasy demonstrated the strongest positive relationship with the number of environment-focused requirements identified by them, a novel finding in this work. Taken together, these findings provide an important first step towards understanding the relationship between novice designers' individual differences and their adoption of environment-focused sustainability in engineering design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transformative technologies and products can help solve some of society's most complex problems. To create these new products and increase the likelihood of desired impact, designers would benefit from understanding and improving a product's social impacts while still in development. Methods of predicting social impacts have been proposed that estimate a product's impacts on aggregated groups of people, but these approaches are inadequate at approximating the complexities of a society's socio-technical systems. In this paper, a new methodology is presented that utilizes information from individuals in a synthetic population to create social impact models for engineered products. Using this method, a product designer can make predictions about a product's social impacts during the product development process. Social impact predictions are made for individuals in the population, thereby giving product designers an understanding of a product's impact at the individual level. Once these individual impacts are aggregated, the product designer can also estimate the social impact of a product on sub-populations and communities. While this method can guide product designers in better understanding a product's social impacts, it is limited by the availability of high-quality individual-level data, the designer's understanding of the product's socio-technical system, and the existing complexity of social systems. This methodology is illustrated by predicting the social impact of a new cassava peeling machine being developed with a farming cooperative in the Brazilian Amazon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just in the past 12 months, we have witnessed significant devastating environmental events including, fires in southeast Mediterranean and Balkan countries, in the US and elsewhere, floods in Europe and Asia, and extreme temperatures including their odd fluctuation. Another example is the trade-off between carbon and water footprint for biofuels (Berger et al. [2]). The trade-off between carbon and water footprints of European biofuels. One approach to foster this is to ask of every submission, a statement regarding its impact on the environment - the Research Environmental Impact Disclosure (REID). [Extracted from the article]

Nowadays sustainable design is a mandatory requirement in the product development process. For this reason, design methodologies are addressed to establish a close relationship between environmental, social and economic impact indicators and product features from early design stages, especially in those features related to its manufacturing. In this paper, the design for manufacturing and assembly—DFMA methodology is adapted to sheet metal enclosure devices, integrating functional and component relationships to minimize particular sustainability indicators such as energy consumption, carbon footprint, number of parts, required amount of material, assembly time and manufacturing costs. Savings with the proposed method are achieved following specific sub-tasks oriented to define new simplified product components, considering changes in manufacturing processes and re-defining mechanical connections between parts. Traditional DFMA approaches consider manufacturing and assembly issues related to a reduction of product complexity and economic savings. The proposed method aims to examine the benefits in life cycle stages such as raw material consumption, service, maintenance, upgrading and end of life—EOL. The methodology is validated through a redesign of a sheet metal industrial clock, in which the sustainability impacts are calculated from a comparison of an existent product vs. a new product development. The implementation of the method in the case study demonstrate reductions of more than 25% in product mass, consumed energy and CO2 footprint, and more than 50% in theoretical assembly time and product complexity. Sustainability indicators of the proposed method are selected from literature analysis and taking into account attributes of sheet metal enclosure devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture is facing increasing innovation challenges to meet current societal expectations, yet very few design science studies are devoted to it. This paper highlights some of the particularities of the objects, reasoning and organization of design in agriculture that may open fruitful scientific dialogue between design scientists and agricultural scientists. We first provide an overview of the broad range of objects that are designed in agriculture and point out their specific characteristics with regard to design. We then identify some particular challenges of design activities in agriculture and review how they have been addressed up to now. Finally, we discuss how design challenges and characteristics in agriculture can contribute to current debate in the field of design science. We propose two main lines of enquiry and debate: enhancing the links between design reasoning and organization and further conceptualizing the status of use situations in design to deal with uncertainties and complexity in design processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designing an engineering system that is both environmentally and economically sustainable is a challenging task. Designers need to cope with socio-technical uncertainties and design systems to provide high performance during long lifecycles. Flexibility in engineering design provides ways to address such challenges by making engineering systems changeable in the face of uncertainty. It is difficult, however, to identify suitable system elements for designing flexibility, especially when subjected to multiple sources of uncertainty and complex interdependency between socio-technical and systems elements. This paper considers embedding flexibility into the engineering design as a mechanism to ensure better sustainability and to improve economic performance in long-term lifecycles. The main contribution is a novel methodology to identify valuable opportunities to embed flexibility as a way to deal pro-actively with uncertainty in market and environment. The proposed methodology integrates Bayesian network into engineering system design to effectively model complex change propagation in the flexibility identification process. It helps structure concept generation activities by identifying candidate areas to embed flexibility in the system. It compares favorably to other concept generation methods (e.g., prompting, brainstorming) that require modeling and evaluation of a large number of concepts generated in order to identify the ones offering better performance. It differs from other flexibility enabler identification methods by considering indirect as well as direct dependencies, in addition to the probabilistic nature and risk resulting from possible changes. Another contribution is the demonstration application of the proposed methodology through the analysis of a waste-to-energy technology in Singapore based on anaerobic digestion. Results show that the expected net present value of the flexible design concepts provides more than 10 % improvement over a fixed benchmark design in terms of economic lifecycle performance. This design is conducive of better economic sustainability via additional power generation and better use of resources. Results also indicate that the flexible design can reduce downside risks and capitalize on upside opportunities significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]