Local value creation and eco-design: A new paradigm

Design has a great role to play in sustainability. Interesting progresses has been performed within the last decades. Nevertheless, some issues of sustainability, and their impact on design, remains poorly studied. Specifically, when it comes to the field of local value creation, the literature in design is still limited. However, the Local Value Creation (LVC) thinking can be a great insight for designers to develop more ecoinnovative concepts, through new product design, new services and new business models. In order to go towards this direction, it is necessary to include new variables that are rarely considered in design processes such as the local workforce, sustainable local resources or the customization of the new product or service for local customers. This paper proposes a better understanding of the relation between eco-design approaches and LVC, and more precisely how current eco-design approaches consider this issue. To do so, a first part introduces the Local Value Creation concept and its challenges for sustainability. Then, a second part focuses on a literature review to understand how the LVC dimension is studied in the eco-design process. This will lead in a third section to concretely characterize how eco-design approaches and tools consider LCV issue. A last section proposes to identify potential contradiction between the LVC and the eco-design concept, in order to draw first outlines of a new eco-design paradigm with a Local Value Creation dimension. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.