FESTivE: an information system method to improve product designers and environmental experts information exchanges

Effective collaboration between product designers and environmental experts is an important driver for the ecodesign practice in industry. This paper investigates the principal functions required for such an e ective collaboration and aims at facilitating them. Product designers should be able to integrate the environmental parameters into their activities, and to exchange information dynamically with the environmental expert whenever needed during the design process. Therefore, the IT system should be in itself dynamic and exible to the integration of new concepts (knowledge, software). Recent developments in Model Driven Engineering (MDE) are showing some interesting results to gain exibility and dynamism in the IT system. Combining software interoperability using model federation based on MDE with the speci city of ecodesign practice in industry this paper proposes the FESTivE method for Federate EcodeSign Tool modEls. Experimented in two different industrial contexts the practical feasibility of FESTivE has been validated with practitioners. Results on the e ects of using FESTivE in industry shows that product designers and environmental experts are more equipped to anticipate and to respond to each other's needs at each stage of the design process of product or service

Linking Use Stage Life Cycle Inventories with Product Design Models of Usage

International audienceUsage can have a significant environmental impact on the product life cycle. A precise evaluation and understanding of this impact during design is crucial to support early and adapted feedbacks to design experts to encourage the eco-design practice. Information on usage is spread across different field of expertise, and involves explicit and tacit knowledge. This research aims at improving the link between the available usage information, and the environmental expert’s explicit knowledge on usage. A five steps method is proposed and exemplified in this paper to formalize this link. The paper finally raises the question of how to deal with conflicting usage information during design in industry

Exploring design to environment methods though grassroots initiatives

Targeting sustainability in our industrial society requires integrating specific criteria in the design process of products and processes. A paradigm shift is necessary in the economical, social and political systems to ensure the natural ecosystems preservation on the planet while fulfilling society needs. Various research methods have therefore emerged to change the way products and services are designed, developed, used and discarded considering territorial contexts. Design for Sustainability, Design for Sustainable Transition, Socially Responsible Design, post-growth design, etc. provide several methods integrating the sustainable principles in the design process. However those approaches remain mainly experimental and are limited to the industrial context. In parallel to those approaches a wide variety of grassroots initiatives have emerged in territories. They propose alternative ways to design systems and they integrate new constraints in a practical manner. This research therefore aims to confront the diversity of Design to Environment (DtE) approaches with 'grassroots' initiatives in order to understand the possible evolution of the integration of sustainability into the design process of products and services used in industry. This paper presents the first literature review results of a started project in 2020. An original research protocol is proposed in this paper, based on specific focus groups with grassroots initiatives practitioners and eco-design experts from research and industry. The presentation of four DtE frameworks are analysed in this paper. This research finally discusses the opportunity of integrating the grassroots enriched DtE frameworks by non-officialdesigners in life cycle engineering. This bottom-up process may drive an expression of sustainability in industry aligned with some emerging local socio-technical systems

Dynamic eco-design strategic options for electric-electronic industry

National audienceToday industries from the electric and electronic sector are facing the challenge of improving the environmental performance of the product (eco-design). Various corporate attitudes and their related policy conduct industries to launch different solutions for eco-designing their product and services. Various strategic needs for environmental improvements therefore emerge. In addition important amount of eco-design methods are available. The challenge of planning which eco-design method to be used for a specific need is thus considerably increasing over time. This research therefore aims at providing a mechanism to generate some relevant eco-design options or some sets of methods for answering to the specific corporate orientations chosen. Existing eco-design methods used in the electric-electronic sector have been carefully analyzed and various ‘interactions’ between the actions followed in those methods have been identified. From this analysis, this research provides a new network of eco-design actions allowing company to explore different solutions and roadmaps for reaching concrete eco-design requirements. The company is able to select the solutions that best follow its eco-design needs depending on its specified strategic constraints and their dynamic operational context. Meanwhile, a framework was proposed to guide the company to consider these different eco-design options within its specific context. This method has been used on a case study, which has demonstrated that its ability to efficiently support the company in reaching eco-design goals

Toward proactive eco-design based on engineer and eco-designer's software interface modeling

Lien vers la version éditeur: http://www.designsociety.org/publication/30585/toward_proactive_eco-design_based_on_engineer_and_eco-designers_software_interface_modelingIntegrating environmental concerns as well as other constrains (cost, quality, etc.) in the design process, requires to organize the process as a system. Specific software for each design expertise are created to embrace new demands and are supporting the design activity in such complexity that the interoperability between software is crucial. The approach presented in this paper proposes a specific organization of the design process composed of local and global activities. The article focuses on the importance of modeling the data input and output exchanged between activities. It points out the necessity to define rules of transformation that are needed to link models together. The system modeled allows an infinite number of interactions and notably the integration of environmental concerns. This paper illustrates the method by studying a part of the design process of a simple product in a DTE approach. This case study involves software of material choice, CAD, LCA and focuses on transformation rules needed to give interoperable models. The results of the case study finally bring designers to adopt a new design of the product, which reduces initial environmental impacts

An Innovative Approach to Teaching Sustainable Design and Management

International audienceFor many years the market leadership was driven by offering better price on more product functions and services. The world is currently shifting towards social responsibility thinking. This changes the market behaviour, and leads to more innovations, such as designing new product/service/system using re-usable parts, new electric motor concepts, or inventing new chemical production procedures generating less waste, and many more opportunities. This paper introduces a research valorisation activity that aims at developing a program of training and coaching to prepare students and industry partners to this emerging innovation wave. The most outstanding particularity of this program is that it combines management and engineering aspects of sustainability in a form that empowers trainees to deploy sustainable approaches in practice. The particular target group of design engineers get equipped with fundamentally important sustainability knowledge enabling them to include sustainability considerations in their products and systems design. Eco-design is positioned as a key lever towards achieving sustainable product-service systems

The greenhouse gas profile of a “Hungry Planet”:quantifying the impacts of the weekly food purchases including associated packaging and food waste of three families

The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) have estimated that 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted across the supply chain, while food security emerges as one of the leading challenges facing a growing global population. Life cycle assessment (LCA) can illustrate the environmental implications of food production, consumption and waste. In 2005, Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio presented a photographic study in “Hungry Planet – What the World Eats” documenting what thirty families across twenty-four countries ate during the course of one week. The weekly food purchasing inventories of three of these families have been combined with LCA data to report the greenhouse gas intensity of these food purchases. The greenhouse gas emission profile including those of 128 varieties of fresh food, along with data on packaging material production and household food waste, have been used in the calculations. The paper will present the findings illustrating the contribution each component has: food, packaging and food waste; and will also discuss the implications for food packaging desig

Anthropocène : Plan B, création de connaissances pour répondre aux enjeux sociétaux de manière soutenable dans les limites planétaires

De nombreuses recherches et en particulier celles sur les limites planétaires ont montré que nous dépassons actuellement plusieurs limites globales, ce qui questionne fortement la soutenabilité de nos sociétés contemporaines à forte empreinte écologique. Cette prise de conscience se généralise et a fait croître à une vitesse importante les attentes sociétales de visions alternatives à un futur basé sur le seul progrès technologique et/ou une croissance économique infinie.Nous souhaitons faire face à ces constats et aux attentes qu’ils génèrent, sans greenwashing et sans nous en remettre à une croissance verte que nous savons impossible depuis longtemps et notamment par les travaux commandités par le Club de Rome. Impossibilité qui a été rappelée récemment à notre mémoire par une note de l’UE. Pour cela nous souhaitons engager l’UGA dans la construction, sur le long terme, d’une communauté scientifique transdisciplinaire. Nous proposons de développer des recherches complémentaires et alternatives à celles basées sur la double hypothèse d’un éternel progrès technologique et d’une croissance économique qui serait nécessairement vertueuse sur le plan social. Ces recherches auront pour objectif principal d’appréhender la dimension systémique et complexe des questions de dépassement écologique.Pour cela nous savons que nous pouvons d’ores et déjà appuyer notre démarche sur plusieurs collectifs de personnels et d’étudiants nés spontanément dans différentes structures de l’UGA. Leur diversité de profils et de disciplines constitue un atout précieux pour construire une approche transdisciplinaire. Nous pensons donc qu’il est utile et pertinent d’essayer de fédérer ces initiatives dans une démarche collective commune de production de connaissances

Toward proactive eco-design based on engineer and eco-designer's software interface modeling

Lien vers la version éditeur: http://www.designsociety.org/publication/30585/toward_proactive_eco-design_based_on_engineer_and_eco-designers_software_interface_modelingIntegrating environmental concerns as well as other constrains (cost, quality, etc.) in the design process, requires to organize the process as a system. Specific software for each design expertise are created to embrace new demands and are supporting the design activity in such complexity that the interoperability between software is crucial. The approach presented in this paper proposes a specific organization of the design process composed of local and global activities. The article focuses on the importance of modeling the data input and output exchanged between activities. It points out the necessity to define rules of transformation that are needed to link models together. The system modeled allows an infinite number of interactions and notably the integration of environmental concerns. This paper illustrates the method by studying a part of the design process of a simple product in a DTE approach. This case study involves software of material choice, CAD, LCA and focuses on transformation rules needed to give interoperable models. The results of the case study finally bring designers to adopt a new design of the product, which reduces initial environmental impacts

A framework for ecodesign: an interface between LCA and design process.

Integrating environmental aspects in the design process is getting more and more covered by the actual scientific research. Based on various fields such as "eco-design", "Design for sustainability", "eco-innovation", several specific software and methods have been developed to tackle this issue. Our work focuses on product designer software and eco-designer software that already exist. This research analyses product design and eco-design—considering their respective complexity—in order to determine the main difficulties to systematically integrate environmental aspects in the design process. Our observations have led us to work on three elements: information, software, and collaboration between designers and LCA expert. The principal objective is to facilitate the interface between product design and eco-design by linking the requirements and performances of both domains. It seems therefore necessary to help the collaboration between various experts and thus to develop a digital interface enabling designers to exchange data and to use their appropriate related software. The aim of this paper is to argue the need of a digital tool interfacing the actual tools of the design process and of eco-design (among the related software such as CAD, CAx, PLM, and LCA). This “digital interface” is presented at the end of the paper and will be created next year