Requirements for Design and Environmental Assessment of Products

Companies can have competitive advantage if their products are developed with the help of users and their practice in mind. Product development needs to include user views in the design [1] as the changes to product proposals in design stage needs less effort and time and has major influence on later stages. User-centered design methods have been proposed and implemented. Virtual reality technology has been developed to support these design methods. Advances in virtual reality technologies help realize virtually not only the products but the environment in which they can be used and the actors who use them. This research aims at investigating the eco-design methods and the technology supporting them. A huge challenge in eco-design is to make clear the environmental potential of products for both the engineer and the user. The paper deals with the use of virtual reality technology to see how it can help both designer and user in design and assessment of product and its use to reduce environmental impact. Different studies are reported in literature [2], [3], and [4] but do not address the environmental properties. The paper reviews the literature to propose the requirements of a user-centered eco-design method and investigates the potential benefits of the holographic technology for this purpose.