A framework for integration of sustainability issues into traditional product design process

The integration of sustainability requirements into product development is a widely accepted strategy in principle, although not commonly practiced. How we can combine sustainability issues with the traditional design requirements such as cost, function, and quality in product development process still needs investigations. This research is an attempt to provide a systematic easy to follow framework for designers in order to incorporate the sustainable development issues related to their product ideas.; In this research, sustainable product design ideas have the following three features: (1) Environmentally benign---design idea or option offers measurable environmental benefits; (2) Socially equitable---design idea fills the needs of stakeholders involved in the product life-cycle; (3) Economically viable---design ideas is innovative and competitive in the marketplace such that it drives new revenues by using environmental focus and human-centric approaches to add value to products, reach out to (green) consumers.; Introduced framework promotes innovative solution to meet the functional requirements of customers by incorporating Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) into the idea generation process. One of the special features of this methodology is before detail design stage; a product idea is comparatively evaluated in terms of sustainability criteria. Featured methodology identifies that when a product idea (or option) is evaluated, both subjective and quantitative criteria have to be considered. Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) is used as the basis for product idea evaluation process. The product idea generation with consideration of sustainability factors is considered as a problem situation in which there exist a large number of social and human activity components. The steps of the presented methodology are anchored in Checkland's Soft System Methodology (SSM) steps.