Design for End of Life: A Design Methodology for the Early Stages of an Innovation Process

DS 74: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Engineering & Product Design Education (E&PDE12) Design Education for Future Wellbeing, Antwerp, Belguim, 06-07.9.2012

Year: 2012
Editor: Lyndon Buck, Geert Frateur, William Ion, Chris McMahon, Chris Baelus, Guido De Grande, Stijn Verwulgen
Author: Peeters, Jef R.; Dewulf
Series: E&PDE
Institution: 1: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Centre for Industrial Managament Traffic & Infrastructure, Leuven, Belgium; 2: University College of West-Flanders, Industrial Design Centre, Kortrijk, Belgium; 3: Delft University of Technology, Design for Sustainability, Delft, The Netherlands
Section: Design Methods - Methodical Innovation
Page(s): 185-190
ISBN: 978-1-904670-36-0

Abstract

The first phases of the engineering design process, such as the problem definition, the information gathering and the idea generation phase, are commonly considered as important steps in product development, since the cost of a product is assumed to be largely determined within these design steps. Besides limiting the product costs, designers are nowadays forced to reduce the environmental impact and to optimize possible economic gains over the total product lifecycle. Therefore, within this paper a design method is presented to assist designers to take into account different End-of-Life (EoL) treatment strategies in the early stages of the design process. During the proposed design method, designers are first introduced to the existing EoL treatment options and thereafter encouraged to apply different design strategies, such as design for (active) disassembly. Also, the results of adopting the proposed design method within the Erasmus European Intensive Program (IP2012) ‘Green products through a multicoloured approach’, a multidisciplinary two week workshop that was held at Howest (University College of West-Flanders) in Belgium, are presented in this paper.

Keywords: EoL treatment, front-end innovation, design for X, design method

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