A Method for Developing Design for Environment Guidelines for Future Product Design

Design for environment principles and guidelines help designers create greener products during the early stages of design when life cycle analysis is not feasible. However, the available guidelines are not exhaustive and a general methodology for discovering guidelines has yet to be proposed. In this paper, a method for identifying green design guidelines is presented, which aims to fulfill the need for more comprehensive guidelines. The method combines typical aspects of product design, such as customer needs analysis, with reverse engineering and life cycle analysis. Although reverse engineering is commonly applied to studies of disassembly and recyclability, the methodology and case study herein show how reverse engineering can be applied to areas of product utilization and energy consumption in particular. A general description of the methodology helps readers apply it to their own studies, and a case study of electric kettles shows how each step of the method was applied to reveal four new design guidelines.