Developing a Guidance System for Selecting Eco-Design Checklists in New Product Development

Abstract

Awareness of people, companies and societies about environmental impacts has been markedly increased in last years. This has caused many companies and practitioners to consider environmental aspects in various areas such as product development, service, and etc. Nowadays, product-based companies have come to the conclusion that making eco-friendly products or green products can be their competitive advantage in the market. To make eco-products, companies require to apply specific tools, and to integrate environmental aspects into their product development processes. For this purpose, scores of eco-design tools have been developed thus far. Most of these eco-design tools are applied into later stages of the product development process or to improve the existing products (redesigning). However, the most effective way to consider environmental issues is to incorporate these issues at the early stages of the process. This research, through scrutinizing various eco-design tools and identifying applicable ones into the early stages of product development process, will design and develop a guidance system in order to help product designers and eco-design practitioners choose an appropriate eco-design checklist to their own specific product development context. Then, the guidance system will be examined by two different product development contexts, and the usability of the system will be analyzed. In continue, this research will make efforts to evaluate the effectiveness of eco-design checklists by using a real product development case study, i-care. In order to show the feasibility and applicability of the eco-design checklists, the application of these checklists to a real case study is necessary to assess the effectiveness, usefulness and reliability of results. Since different firms have various product development processes and different contexts, thus they should be able to follow the method proposed through this case study to implement and customize it to their own. It is expected that this research will provide practitioners and industries with insights about how to choose an eco-design checklist based on a specific product development case, and how to apply it in order to incorporate environmental issues into the product development process, and consequently design an eco-friendly product or improve the product in according to environmental aspects.Keywords: Environmental Impacts, New Product Development, Eco-Design Tools, Eco-Design Checklists, Guidance System, Effectiveness Evaluation