WHY CHOOSE ONE SUSTAINABLE DESIGN STRATEGY OVER ANOTHER: A DECISION-SUPPORT PROTOTYPE

Sustainable design strategies provide tangible ways for integrating sustainability into early phase product design work. Examples include design for remanufacturing and design for the base of the pyramid. There are many such strategies and it is difficult to choose between them. Sustainable product design activities also need to be tailored to business priorities. We therefore designed a decision-support prototype to aid project teams to choose strategies based on relevance to the project in terms of both business and sustainability value. To design the prototype, we first identified potential strategies from sustainable product development literature. We then used literature on each of six selected strategies to identify potential business and sustainability benefits. We developed a way to compare sustainability value based on a scientifically established definition of sustainability and a lifecycle perspective. The prototype is designed to be usable by practitioners who are not necessarily sustainable design experts. The prototype was created to enable future work to test ways to integrate the selection of sustainable design strategies into the early phases of product design.