Axiomatic Design for eco-design: eAD⁺

Abstract

The majority of the ecological effects of a company and its products are determined in the early stages of design. Since Axiomatic Design (AD) may be helpful in guiding early design decisions, we develop an eco-design methodology based on AD called eAD⁺. We identify hundreds of factors that are relevant for eco-design from stakeholders, the literature and company websites. These are condensed into 94 ecological customer needs (eCNs). From these we identify about 20 ecological functional requirements (eFRs) that can be used at the enterprise and product/system level. We next consider how the eCNs, eFRs and ecological metrics such as life cycle assessment (LCA) can be included in AD. To avoid issues related to functional independence, which is essential in AD, we consider LCA as a selection criterion. LCA can be naturally included in the AD design matrix by appending additional rows but not additional columns. Several examples using eAD⁺ are considered to demonstrate how decoupling arises in eco-design and how to include LCA. It is our hope that these steps towards a general extension of AD for eco-design will help designers seeking to improve the ecological performance of their company and the products/systems it provides.

Keywords:

• sustainable design
• eco-design
• Axiomatic Design
• life cycle assessment

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the KAIST Environment, Energy, Water and Sustainability (EEWS) grant N0110004600.

We wish to thank Mijeong Shin who conducted early investigations in this direction and collected the eco-factors that have been organised and classified in this paper in Section 3.

We wish to thank Professor Mary Kathryn Thompson for reviewing early versions of this work. The paper is much improved for her suggestions.