DESIGN FOR ENVIRONMENT (DFE)

DESIGN FOR THE ENVIRONMENT (DFE)

 is a design approach to reduce the overall human health and environmental impact of a product, process or service, where impacts are considered across its life cycle.Different software tools have been developed to assist designers in finding optimized products or processes/services. 

Decision Making in New Product Development

 Decision making is an important activity in new product development, and a great variety of decisions need to be made. Generally speaking, these fall into two types: design decisions and management decisions. 

           Design Decisions

Design decisions address the question, “What should the design be?” They determine shape, size, material, process, and components. These generate information about the product design itself and the requirements that it must satisfy. 

           Management Decisions 

     Management decisions address the issues of what should be done to make the design into a successful product. Management decisions control the progress of the design process. They affect the resources, time, and technologies available to perform development activities. They define which activities should happen, their sequence, and who should perform them. That is, what will be done, when will it be done, and who will do it. The clearest example is project management: planning, scheduling, task assignment, and purchasing. 

   In studying design projects, Krishnan and Ulrich provide an excellent review of the decision making in new product development, organized around topics that follow the typical decomposition of product development.8 Herrmann and Schmidt describe the decision-making view of new product development in more detail.9,10 Traditionally, factors such as product performance and product cost have dominated design decisions, while time to market and development cost have influenced management decisions. Of course, many decisions involve combinations of these objectives. 

    Considering environmental issues during decision making in new product development, while certainly more important than ever before, has been less successful for manufacturers than considering other objectives. Environmental objectives are not similar to the traditional objectives of product performance, unit cost, time to market, and development cost. All four objectives directly affect profitability and are closely monitored. Unit cost, time to market, and development cost each use a single metric that is well understood and uncomplicated. Although product performance may have multiple dimensions, these characteristics are quantifiable and clearly linked to the product design. Designers understand how changing the product design affects the product performance. Environmental objectives do not have these qualities.

          Environmental Objectives

Under pressure from various stakeholders to consider environmental issues when developing new products, manufacturing firms have declared their commitment to environmentally responsible product development and have identified six relevant goals:

1. Comply with legislation. Products that do not comply with a nation’s environmental regulations cannot be sold in that nation.
2. Avoid liability. Environmental damage caused by a product represents a financial liability.
3. Satisfy customer demand. Some consumers demand environmentally responsible products. Retailers, in turn, pass along these requirements to manufacturers.
4. Participate in eco-labeling programs. Products that meet requirements for eco-labeling are more marketable.
5. Enhance profitability. Certain environmentally friendly choices such as remanufacturing, recycling, and reducing material use make good business sense and have financial benefits.
6. Behave ethically. Being a good steward of the planet’s resources by considering the environment during the product development process is the right thing to do.

Despite the high profile given to these objectives at the corporate level, product development teams assign a back-burner status to environmental issues. Environmental objectives, for the most part, are driven by regulations and social responsibility, and reducing environmental impact doesn’t clearly increase profit. Product managers are not often willing to compromise profit, product quality, or time to market in order to create products that are more environmentally benign than required by regulations. (The exceptions are those organizations that court environmentally conscious consumers.)

Environmental performance, however, is measured using multiple metrics, some of which are qualitative. Moreover, these metrics may seem irrelevant to the firm’s financial objectives. Measuring environmental performance, especially life-cycle analysis (LCA), can require a great deal of effort.

With environmental performance it is harder to make trade-offs. It is not clear how to select between design alternatives because there is no aggregate measure to calculate.

EXAMPLES OF DfE INNOVATIONS
    This section provides examples of products that have been designed to reduce adverse environmental impact. Most of these products introduce increased functionality in addition to being more environmentally friendly. It is important to recognize what has been accomplished in the field of environmental design and build on this existing knowledge. By combining ideas that have been implemented in the past with their own ingenuity, designers can create new products that have minimal adverse environmental impacts, as well as adding to the environmental design knowledge base.

1. Forever Flashlight

The Forever Flashlight is a flashlight that does not require batteries or bulbs. Its power is generated by the user shaking the flashlight. When the user shakes the flashlight, a piece wound with copper wire moves through a magnetic field and generates power that is stored in the flashlight. Fifteen to 30 seconds of shaking can provide up to five minutes of light. Also, the Forever Flashlight uses a blue LED instead of its bulb due to its longevity. This flashlight prevents environmental harm by reducing battery usage and provides more functionality than a typical flashlight because the user will never be left in the dark due to dead batteries

2. Battery-Free Remote Control

The Volvo Car Corp. and Delft University of Technology created a batteryfree remote control for automobiles. This was done by utilizing the piezo effect, the charge created when crystals such as quartz are compressed. The remote is designed with a button on top and a flexible bottom. When the user pushes the button, the top button and flexible bottom compress the crystal, creating an electrical charge that powers a circuit to unlock the car. This prevents environmental harm by reducing battery usage

3. Toshiba’s GR-NF415GX Refrigerator

The Toshiba GR-NF415GX is an excellent example of a more environmentally benign product. It won the 2003 Grand Prize for Energy Conservation. In addition, this product example provides more insight than most because Takehisa Okamoto, an engineer who designed the refrigerator, participated in an interview discussing the design of the product.26 Takeshisa describes the problem with previous refrigerators in this excerpt:

To review the mechanics of earlier refrigerators, previously both the refrigerator and freezer sections were cooled by a single cooling unit. Since the refrigerator section didn’t require as much cooling as the freezer section, it tended to be over-cooled. To prevent this, a damper was attached to open and close vents automatically. This would close the vents when it got too cold and open them when it got too warm. However, in the area near the vents where the cold air came out, eggs would sometimes get too cold or tofu would sometimes freeze.

Takeshisa then describes the solution to the problem and advantages of the new refrigerator:

Then the twin cooling unit refrigerator was developed. This involved two cooling units—one in the refrigerator section and one in the freezer section—using a single compressor. This system alternates between cooling the refrigerator and cooling the freezer, which allows each section to be cooled to a more suitable temperature. While the freezer’s being cooled, the frost that accumulates on the cooling unit in the refrigerator section, where coolant isn’t flowing, is melted once again and returned to the refrigerator section using a fan for humidification. This prevented drying, so that cheese and ham wouldn’t lose all their moisture

The technology makes it possible to cool the refrigerator and freezer sections simultaneously and to maintain two temperatures, with a major difference in temperatures between the temperatures of the refrigerator cooling unit (−3.5◦ C) and the freezer cooling unit (−24◦ C). Now, the refrigerator section is cooled by −2◦ C air to maintain a temperature of 1◦ C. This technology uses an ultra-low-energy freeze cycle that makes it possible to cool using cold air at temperatures close to the ideal temperature for the food.

 Since this is the first technology of this kind in the industry, some aspects were definitely difficult. At the same time, I think this innovation was really the key point of this development. The two-stage compressor distributes coolant compressed in two stages in two directions: to the refrigerator side and to the freezer side. For this reason, the flows of coolant to each cooling unit must be adjusted to ensure optimal flow. We achieved efficient simultaneous cooling using a pulse motor valve (PMV).

 From this dialogue, one can see that there is an improvement in freshness of the food due to the accuracy of the air temperature being output into the refrigeration section. This innovation also conserves electricity because of the ultra-low-energy freeze cycle. In addition, a typical engineering solution to this problem would require two compressors to achieve the final result, while this product only required one.

4. Matsushita Alkaline Ion Water Purifier

The Matsushita PJ-A40MRA alkaline ion water purifier has increased functionality and decreased environmental impact compared to the TK7505 alkaline ion water purifier. The new water purifier increases functionality by allowing the user to select seven kinds of water quality (as opposed to five) based on the quality a user needs in a particular situation. The new purifier also decreases environmental impact by reducing standby power from 6 watts to 0.7 watts through division of the integrated power source into two separate power sources for operation and standby.