Providing the correct destination at the end of the product's use phase is essential for value recovery and to reduce the environmental impact at this lifecycle stage. To understand the e-waste recycling behavior among users, this article aims to identify the most common destinations given to smartphones when they are no longer used. A systematic literature review was carried out, and 13 studies were selected for a meta-analysis. The variable is the selection of the most common destinations for e-waste: reuse and recycling (recovered value), storage and informal collection (missed value), and household waste (destroyed value). The results present a summarized measure with the combined proportion of the studies for each category. Studies were weighted by the precision of confidence interval estimates presented in Forest Plots. The main results point out common problems and demonstrate how the strategies and policies adopted in each country can influence the chosen methods of disposal. These specificities require unique strategies to deal with local problems. As a secondary contribution, this study proposes guidelines to reduce e-waste generation and to create awareness and infrastructure to increase value recovery.

How can we design and engineer research that leads to the development and effective implementation of complex healthcare interventions? We advocate for a systems design-based approach when initiating clinical research to anticipate the proposition of complex interventions. Using cognitive care as an example, we investigate how hybrid design-inspired methodologies can promote organisational effectiveness and how strong clinical evidence can support successful conceptualisation and uptake of novel interventions into routine clinical practice.

This paper proposes an analytical framework for estimating the domain where a type of technology can be used in a system. In order to achieve this aim, we have elaborated on the concepts of technology critical, technology sensitive, and the technology comfort zone, to analytically assess the impact of a new technology in the early phases of system design. The result is a general method to indicate the range of requirements that can result in valid designs. This tool can assist in the decision-making processes for technology portfolio selection based on sustainable principles.

The emergence of intermediary platforms created networks that facilitate peer-to-peer interactions, as well as encourage the sharing of goods and services within the context of collaborative consumption and cost saving. This article sets out to inspect “why the sharing economy is so successful” and provide a critical viewpoint on the topic's essential ideas, while also taking a perspective on the advantages and disadvantages that affect the end users. A literature review paired with case studies of Airbnb, Uber, and other applications of the shared economy, looks upon how despite their rapid market growth in the past decade and public approval, such platforms caused disruptions to the markets they operate in. Results indicate that by being involved as a part of the collaborative consumption ecosystem, either as a provider or a user, the absence of personal ownership is key, while the utilisation of the product needs to be maximised to result in a pleasant experience. However, it is critical that the development of these platforms which thrive on connecting people stays closely monitored by regulatory bodies, and that the legislation needed for prevention of unethical practices follows quickly enough to ensure rightful operation.

Stakeholders consider aesthetics and sustainability as important aspects of over-the-counter pharmaceutical (OTCP) packaging, and studies show that their interests should be represented more. To address this, a framework which supports designers to develop aesthetically pleasing sustainable OTCP packaging was generated, keeping at its core the stakeholders. The requirements were identified, leading to the architecture development and implementation in a prototype tool. Results provide a degree of evidence that the framework contributes to a user-centred design approach for OTCP packaging.

This paper presents five industrial cases where design automation (DA) systems supported by design optimization has been developed, and aims to summarize the lesson learned and identify needs for future development of such projects. By mapping the challenges during development and deployment of the systems, common issues were found in technical areas such as model integration and organizational areas such as knowledge transfer. The latter can be seen as a two-layered design paradox; one for the product that the DA system is developed for, and one for the development of the DA system.

For some years now, a part of the population in Europe has been willing to moderate its consumption and to enter into a sustainable waste reduction perspective. Repair is an important lever in the sustainability of products. It requires appropriate approaches depending on the actors involved, whether they are public, private or at the consumer level. Repair cafés are thus born of local citizen initiatives to act on the life cycle of everyday consumer products. We conducted a qualitative study based on a series of semi-structured interviews with the actors of repair cafés in the Grenoble area (France) and carried out an analysis of qualitative data. This analysis, according to three pre-defined fields, technology-competencies-motivations, reveals the perception of the actors on the current obstacles and opportunities for the development of the amateur repair practice. The results obtained support studies already carried out on the subject and show that design is still failing to match amateur reparation requirements. Besides, the social role of these third places takes precedence over the ecological and economic dimension of repair.

Process modelling (PM) is used to support designers by providing guidance on what needs to be done. Change processes in development organizations accompany introduction of new procedures, new methods (also digital form), tools that have to integrated into existing processes. Objective of this paper is to provide guidance to designers in selecting the appropriate PM language to support structured changes in processes. Requirements are derived from frequent change needs in SME and a PM morphology is provided assisting the selection and use of suitable PM languages for change processes.

As time-to-market is getting shorter, customer needs have to be identified as early as possible in product development. Correctly applied, corporate foresight can give a glimpse into the future to anticipate such needs and thus gain a competitive advantage. A support tool to choose the appropriate method of foresight is not available yet. Thus, a literature study on foresight methods in industry is performed and a novel decision support tool is proposed which avoids high entrepreneurial risks. Based on the findings, potentials for future work are identified for different types of methods.

Representation of territorial knowledge based on the ontology is an approach which explains the nature and reasoning of this knowledge for sustainability. This research proposes an ontology of domain according to the principles for modelling an ontology. This proposed ontology is named DOTK (descriptive ontology for territorial knowledge). DOTK ontology has specialized the entities of territorial knowledge for sustainability and its aim is enhancing the sustainable knowledge of actors within industries. This ontology is a guide for identifying an operational ontology of real example. This research show that ontology of domain can assist to the identifying of tangible and intangible resources of the local territory. So, these identified resources can help the industries and territory for sustainable objectives and improve the available territorial knowledge within local or regional industries.

This research examines how sustainable product design education can address the deficit in green talent. It presents a framework for a structured curriculum in product design, with hands-on activities, industry-specific case studies, and best practices in alternative design development. The impact of technologies like additive manufacturing on design is considered. Findings demonstrate that knowledge of technological capabilities, industry specific understanding, and proficiency in analytical tools such as Life Cycle Assessments contribute to sustainable designs mitigating a green talent gap.

Dual ontological products are a physical construction and an emotional construction. Multitude of human factors must be considering when designing dual ontological products. To increase the product's impact and reach, designers should also understand the requirements of potential users. A design stage conflict exists between the emotional construction and the physical construction of a product when considering human factors. Designers find it difficult to achieve the right compromise between these constructions and hence, the balancing of the two is crucial. This research therefore contributes a novel harmonistic knowledge-based framework which makes designers aware of design stage conflicts and consequences of commitments made on human factors in the use-phase of the artefact. This approach was implemented in a machine learning based computational tool which exploits harmonistic knowledge and information collected from potential users to proactively assist, guide, and motivate product designers. This paper also presents a descriptive study for the evaluation of the framework and its implementation as a computer-based prototype tool. Results show the necessity and beneficial use of the tool for design engineering practice.

In order to ensure the user's acceptance towards a product, the user has to be captured with all his facets and requirements. In this context, many user-centred design methods only focus on single aspects such as subjective expectation or ergonomic product design. Correlations and connections or a common consideration of several user parameters are often neglected, even if this can provide useful information for improving the design of products. Dual user integration tries to close this gap to a certain extent and considers the user's subjective expectation in combination with their physiological capacities. An integral part of this approach is a target-oriented evaluation of the user. Currently available methods of physiological and subjective evaluation of the user are only partially applicable for dual user integration. Especially physiological measurement techniques are time-consuming and expensive. For this reason, this contribution presents a new concept for capturing and describing the physiological capacity of the user via semantic differentials. Thereby, motor functions, cognition and perception are considered.

Materials can be considered from a technical and experiential perspective. However, the latter perspective is more complex to study systematically. Four intertwined experiential levels describe the overall materials experience: sensorial, interpretive, affective, and performative level. Building upon the need in experiential material characterization for comparable physical material representations to enable within-material-class comparisons and the inclusion of extensive user aspects, this paper sums up the reasoning process regarding the understanding and design of an experimental set-up and its parameters of a specific case. The case objective is to formulate guidelines for the designer/researcher to set up experiential material characterization experiments with (i) plastic demonstrator forms and (ii) by consumers. Following elements are discussed: Assessors, Stimuli, Interaction Modalities, Dependent variables, Method, and Practical considerations. Next, future experiments can be carried out in order to generate holistic plastic material data on a larger scale, that can be collected in an experiential database and used by designers throughout the design process.

Throughout time, the definition of sustainability has been interpreted differently and different philosophies have consequently emerged, each with its own vision of a sustainable society. At the same time, manufacturing firms have focused on environmental improvements, but social aspects have often been neglected. This study identifies 11 philosophies and 51 product design strategies contributing to sustainability awareness, cohesion, and equity, set to ensure social sustainability integration at a manufacturing firm level.

For successful human-artificial intelligence (AI) collaboration in design, human designers must properly use AI input. Some factors affecting that use are designers’ self-confidence and competence and those variables' impact on reliance on AI. This work studies how designers’ self-confidence before and during teamwork and overall competence are associated with their performance as teammates, measured by AI reliance and overall team score. Results show that designers’ self-confidence and competence have very different impacts on their collaborative performance depending on the accuracy of AI.

Engineering design teams, particularly in academic courses, were no exception to the consequences of the unknown virus and the global pandemic. Forced online teaching has influenced the way of using communication technologies. The information flow architecture of engineering design is also transforming due to the remote activities and the dominancy of web-based technologies. This transformation creates different patterns of distributed cognition within design teams. In the course of full remote teaching, we studied the entire information flow of a small and dispersed engineering team through the early stages of design for one month using the ethnographic method and Distributed Cognition analysis techniques. Our analysis, of the interdisciplinary design team during a rocket engineering project and system engineering teaching, shows the considerable role of different online data sharing and communications technology platforms in distributed cognition and collaborative problem solving within the team. These new trends create new challenges and opportunities, and in order to enhance collaborative design, these emerged out of the box trends require more attention and updating of existing strategies.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been established as a benchmark for design for sustainability practices. LCA provides detailed technical documents regarding a product's environmental impact, but its use is often limited to trained experts who share the knowledge with designers. Life cycle experts are highly specialized, and the typical designer faces technical barriers and time constraints in extracting information from LCA documents. This work uses knowledge transfer principles to replicate expert practices in LCA information retrieval to support designers. Life-cycle experts (n = 4) were interviewed to understand practices and challenges in information retrieval for LCA documents. Interview findings were used to create a set of guidelines for effectively navigating LCA documents and then tested in a follow-up task where designers (n = 16) annotated an electric toothbrush LCA using the identified guidelines. Results find designers can effectively extract information from LCA documents given provided guidelines, but need detailed support interpreting complex visual entities like charts and figures. This work is the first step toward enabling knowledge transfer from LCA documents and building a structured sustainability knowledge base.

Machine learning (ML) is a well-established research topic in Industry 4.0 is boosting its adoption. ML is also used for manufacturing cost estimation during design. Such approaches are commonly used to estimate the cost of mass-produced parts. Many consolidated historical data are available for training the regression models. Unfortunately, very often, such a database of data is not available.

The paper defines an ML approach for parametric cost estimation of axisymmetric components. The data for training the ML model derives from automatic software for analytically estimating the manufacturing cost. With a proper set of simulations, the tool can generate a large amount of data for training. The paper presents the steps for developing a parametric cost model using ML. The approach is based on CRoss Industry Standard Process for Data Mining method. The proposed method was used to develop one cost model (to estimate the total cost that considered raw material and manufacturing cost). The obtained Relative Error is 23.52% ± 1.37%, coherent with E2516 − 11, Standard Classification for Cost Estimate Classification System.

Design scholarship has long roots in tackling wicked problems and sustainability, yet less is known about how professional designers interact with sustainability issues in practice. Based on interviews with 104 designers in 101 organizations in Finland, this study compares designer perceptions on the role of design in advancing sustainability. We identify six common roles, each with various foci on different design maturity levels in organisations. The findings support managers and designers in understanding which capabilities might be needed in advancing the role of design and sustainability.