Understanding the Needs of Designers for Developing Environmentally Friendly Products
Year: 2009
Editor: Chakrabarti, A.
Author: Kota,Srinivas; Chakrabarti,Amaresh
Section: Design for Environment, Safety, Manufacture and Cost
Page(s): 128-135
Abstract
The companies are aiming towards developing more and more environmentally friendly products. Designers need to put a lot of effort in developing eco-friendly products and they need different aids to help them in ful lling the requirement. It is found from the literature that there have been lots of aids developed to help designers but very few were used in practice because of gaps in understanding the needs of designer for developing environmentally friendly products. The work reported in this paper tries to understand the needs of designer by analysing 2 sets of questionnaires and video protocol study of 3 sets of design exercises of 8 designers. The study aims at i) nding whether the designers consider environment as a criterion or not, ii)whether it is bettered by providing some help via tool/method/ guidelines, iii) what are the activities that have to be supported while designing and iv) the requirements/needs of designer for developing environmentally friendly products
Keywords: Design for Environment (DfE), Life Cycle Design, Design stages, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)