This study exhibits that there exists generative ethics in which ethical thinking will allow us to change our perspectives to consider the artifacts’ social effects in design, thereby enhancing our activity to generate novel and practical design ideas.

As an example of practicing the generative ethics, a case for addressing the increasing requirement to properly introduce “artificial intelligence” (AI) systems in society was considered. We applied the ethical design theory to promote the practice of ethical AI design by engineers. To achieve this, we implemented a creativity support tool that can be used based on the knowledge base of AI ethics.

To confirm the validity of the theory and the tool, we conducted user experiments in which the AI research students had to consider the effects of their own research projects with using the tool. We could confirm that the tool actually induced the users to consider social impacts. Some students revealed in response to the questionnaire that the experiment provided them with an opportunity to reconsider their own research theme.

In this study, the ethical design theory and tool will be briefly reviewed, and the experiments will be discussed.

Product service systems (PSS) are frequently cited as key strategies in the transition towards the circular economy (CE). The main aim of the CE is sustainable development (SD), hence, this paper intends to highlight the importance of considering the territory in the design and implementation of circular PSS strategies for ensuring SD. This research is in an early stage, thus, a literature review was conducted to define the main characteristics of circular PSS, and the concepts of the territory, territorial and local resources from a PSS perspective. In addition, an analysis of the state-of-the-art approach of the integration of the territorial scale in the design and development of PSS strategies was conducted. This study contributes to the understanding of the territory and its relevance in the local value creation in circular PSS strategies. Furthermore, the results highlight the relevant role of collaboration and the importance of intangible resources in the mobilisation of other resources in the design of circular PSS strategies.

Plastics are ubiquitous in our daily life due to their versatile characteristics, however, these excellent characteristics also contributed to the emergence of a gigantic garbage of floating plastics in our ocean, called the plastic soup. Within this research project we investigated the opportunities by design to cope with this wicked problem. The hypothesis is that picking small opportunities in a wicked problem can have a large impact on the related ecosystem. In addition, we also wanted to investigate how design students would deal with the problem to create larger awareness of the designers' impact and responsibility. Although there is no ideal answer to a systemic problem such as the plastic soup, intervening on systems is possible. As the characteristics of a product directly influence the way the entire value chain works, designers have a large responsibility / opportunity to influence the system. An experiment was executed with 69 design students to explore the opportunities. The resulting design concepts were discussed by experts, reasoning towards relationships, needs to elaborate the design practices, and ecodesign education in a circular economy.

In this paper, I identify issues that arose in a recent pilot project in which designers contributed to the construction field. The project was led by an overall responsible innovation goal for sustainability impact: contribute to global CO2 reduction. The innovation solution being developed to achieve this goal was a sustainable renovation concept intended for upscaling. In this pilot project, it was applied to a social housing block of 12 apartments. The designers sought to help align technical solutions with the residents’ later use of their homes, because the latter is an important factor in achieving a zero-energy outcome. The paper identifies four issues that arose in the collaboration between design and construction and installation professionals. The issues are goal translation, goal dissipation, the contested service interface and the contested responsiveness to residents. I argue that designers can engage and contribute through design intervention and applying care in the collaboration, in order to support the success of responsible innovation.

The aim of our study was to use Kansei Engineering Evaluation to examine the renewal of old buildings with sustainability and innovation by comparing to new buildings. First, we conducted a questionnaire survey, with 84 participants, on 18 buildings from Asian and European countries; the survey used 16 adjectives. Second, we studied the characteristics of new and renewed old buildings in terms of the elements crucial to sustainable and innovative design. The results suggest that the adaptive reuse of old buildings in more sustainable than constructing new buildings. Further, the adjectives preferred by the survey show that the adaptive reuse of old buildings has higher influence with character of “creative” from the innovation viewpoint. This paper presents a project to address sustainability and innovation of adaptive reused of old building at a later stage. This study contributes to the renewal of existing infrastructure to improve its longevity and chance of future reuse, and to ensure environmental sustainability for future society.

This research aims to study the passenger's sustainable attitudes, in-flight catering behaviour, and to develop a persuasive model for behaviour change. Current studies towards the in-flight catering waste are primarily focused on dealing the recyclable materials such as cupboard, newspaper and food packaging. In a survey of 624 respondents, the environmental attitude was a poor predictor of environmental behaviour. The survey data were used to develop the persuasive model based on Persuasive Technology. Four phases of the in-flight catering are based on data from the passenger survey. In-flight touchpoints performed with persuasive function is proposed to raise awareness of food waste classification onboard. This study illustrates how persuasive strategies can change the passenger's food-wasting behaviour.

Junior designers are not trained to cope with critical situations and conflict at work. Most design schools do not educate their design students to prepare them for (potential) conflict. As a result, junior designers often do not have conflict-handling skills to handle critical situations and conflicts. While some tools and methods exist to help them make responsible design choices, these often address value differences underlying (potential) conflict without taking the perspective of the designer, and thus without supporting young designers to start by reflecting on their own intrinsic values.

The aim of this study is to find a way to help junior designers to reflect effectively on critical situations, thereby improving their conflict-handling skills. Data was collected through four steps in an action research. Researchers collaborated with an identity programme for junior design professionals. Insights from try-outs and small interventions were transferred into design requirements for an approach to educate and facilitate junior design professionals to reflect more effectively on critical situations.

The environmental burden of packaging is huge. However, redesigning packaging to make it more sustainable without damaging its other functions is not always easy and can have a negative impact on consumers’ choice. In this paper, we adopt a user-perspective and test the effects of packaging appearance and a better eco-label on consumers’ responses. Based on the literature, we designed an eco- label using a traffic light system with an objective sustainability score enabling to compare the sustainability of different packages. The results of our experimental study (N=120) show that while a sustainable (vs. typical) appearance in packaging has a positive effect on perceived sustainability, it has a negative effect on perceived usability. However, we demonstrate that the presence of a high score on the eco-label positively impacts the perceived sustainability of both the sustainable and the typical packages and the choice intentions. This eco-label also enabled to mitigate the negative effects of the sustainable appearance on perceived usability. Designers and policy-makers can use the results of this paper to positively influence evaluations of and choice for sustainable packaging.

Nowadays, our society needs that an awareness be made about our impact on the planet. Many more or less alarmist reports tell us that there is a need to change our consumption patterns, production and energy consumption … One of the main axes to achieve these goals is education. Thus integrating sustainable development into the skills of future engineers is an essential challenge but above all a necessity to modify and reduce our impact on the environment and to allow a global understanding of the complexity of our society. For this, companies must also evolve. Some will do so in a strategy of greening their image, others will have to comply with the various regulations of their sector of activity and a final category of these companies will use this opportunity as a vector of innovation. Each at their level will make a contribution, the integration over time of new sustainability skills within their staff will expand their action. In this article, we will focus our study on the integration of ecodesign in the industry and the impact that this generates in terms of skills to acquire, values to evolve and knowledge to master.

This paper presents an eco-innovation method by revised the “Anticipatory Failure Determination (AFD)” method which is the failure analysis tools in TRIZ theory. Using the functional analysis to list the system process and make the functional analysis model. Based on the environmental efficiency factors and functional analysis model, Substance-Field inverse analysis can find a lot of failure modes in the system. In order to assess the priority of risk improvement, the designer can calculate the environmental risk priority number including controlling documents, public image and environmental consequences. Designer can quickly find out the potential failure mode in the complex engineering system with the systematic steps. The TRIZ methods are used for finding eco-innovation idea to solve failure problem. The capability of the whole eco-innovative design process was illustrated by the electrical motorcycle case.

This paper tackles two questions. Our first question addresses the multi-actor activity that is visibly required for building radical innovations like eco-innovation. Our second question addresses the tricky issue of how to assess contribution to ecological transition when innovation projects are still in the fuzzy early-upstream phase. In this aim four research projects are selected and analyzed in this paper because they share a common scope—the development of new processes or materials tied to the conversion of biomass. Through the analysis of the actors interactions conducted in these projects, of their perimeters, of their sustainability objectives and of their results we show a limit of the eco-innovation capacity of these projects linked to the limits of their crossdisciplinarity.

Process engineering industries are now facing growing economic pressure and societies' demands to improve their production technologies and equipment, making them more efficient and environmentally friendly. However unexpected additional technical and ecological drawbacks may appear as negative side effects of the new environmentally-friendly technologies. Thus, in their efforts to intensify upstream and downstream processes, industrial companies require a systematic aid to avoid compromising of ecological impact. The paper conceptualises a comprehensive approach for eco-innovation and eco- design in process engineering. The approach combines the advantages of Process Intensification as Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE), inventive tools of Knowledge-Based Innovation (KBI), and main principles and best-practices of Eco-Design and Sustainable Manufacturing. It includes a correlation matrix for identification of eco-engineering contradictions and a process mapping technique for problem definition, database of Process Intensification methods and equipment, as well as a set of strongest inventive operators for eco-ideation.

Engineering Design decisions impact customers, the environment and society at large in ways that have profound ethical and strategic implications for designers. Previous research in decision-based design has proposed the decisions should be made on the basis of maximizing the expected utility of the design to the designer. This paper discusses ethical and strategic challenges for these frameworks across five levels: the axioms that underlie utility, the definition of utility, the consideration of multiple stakeholders, the modeling scope, and resulting design framework implementation. Based on these problems, solutions are suggested to account for each in the development of improved, ethically- informed frameworks. Challenges presented here do not prohibit the prudent use of decision-based design frameworks per se, but instead point to cases that must addressed in practice while providing grounds for further research towards the development of decision-based design frameworks that are ethical by design.

The bottom of the pyramid (BoP) consists of 1.4 billion people living less than 1.25 USD per day. Fulfilling unmet needs of BoP people involves the design of products as a main activity. Designing products for the BoP faces two main problems. First, there is a general lack of understanding of the needs of users and second, traditional design methods may be limited in addressing the BoP context. Frugal innovation is positioned as a very interesting approach with the potential to adequately respond to the design challenges of the products for the BoP. However, studies in engineering design based on frugal innovation are still limited. In response to these issues, through an analysis and review of the literature, an exploratory mapping of the proposals in frugal innovation and the characteristics of the BoP was conducted. On the basis of the results, this paper defines a set of eight frugal criteria design and an identification of three dimensions that characterize a BoP context and two roles of BoP people. Finally, an association of BoP dimensions and roles with the key criteria of frugal design is proposed.

The shift from linear to circular patterns is on the way and rise many questions. In the last ten years, reuse and upcycling are gaining more attention. Since reduce and reuse were describe as a priority by the European Union, some leading projects are unveiled in different countries. Scale and quality of those projects push the reuse issue out of the shadow, far from original prejudices who associate waste and reuse to « poverty » and « Do It Yourself ». Although Reuse emerge as a prominent question, the idea and boundaries of « what is reuse » appears to be blur and not clearly understood. This situation lead to general incomprehension, even for professionals. Reuse, repurpose, upcycling and recycling are usually considered to wear the same meaning despite a huge difference on what it implies.

In this paper we will examine these different notions through a pedagogical case study. We will draw the different ways to regenerate value at all steps of product life cycle in a precise manner. This allows to better insight the meaning of those issues in the case of student design education. In the same time, it aims to be a tool for teaching sustainable design and waste management.

Short-life cycle products are frequently replaced and discarded despite being resource-intensive. The short life span and the low utilization rate of the end-of-life products cause severe environmental problems and waste of resources. In the case of short-life cycle products, a new generation of products is released sooner than other products, therefore there are the opportunities to have various generations of products during the remanufacturing process. The commonality between generations increases the intergenerational component compatibility, which increases the efficiency of the manufacturing and remanufacturing processes, while at the same time weakening the performance difference between generations. This paper proposes a mathematical model to investigate the effect of commonality among generations on the overall production process. Based on various given new generation product designs with different commonality, we aim to propose optimal production planning and pricing strategies to maximize the total profitability and investigate how the results vary according to the commonality strategies between product generations.

The scarce availability of water in highly populated cities is about to become a social problem. While the water service companies work on improving the distribution network in order to reduce losses, it is evident that one of the main problems is due to an excess of use of this resource by users. This consumption is relatively controlled when excessive consumption is clearly associated, in the consumer mind, with high costs. However, when users are in public places they tend to consume water because of a loss of correlation with costs. In this paper, we describe the design of a device to be installed in public environments, which aims to reduce the consumption of water. The device measures in real time the flow of water and sends the user visual and sound information trying to create a link between consumption and costs. The device has been installed in a university campus bathroom and has been tested. Test results show a reduction in water consumption, especially in the interactive prototype approach compared to the conventional treatment. Further modifications for future development of the interactive device is also discussed.

Do different sustainable design methods generate different sustainable design ideas? Do they also drive different product innovation ideas? This project empirically tested three design methods: The Natural Step, Whole System Mapping, and Biomimicry. Testing involved qualitatively categorizing 1,115 design ideas from 23 workshops for over 30 companies, including consultancies and manufacturers in consumer electronics, furniture, and apparel. The categorized ideas were then counted to determine if the different design methods caused different kinds of ideas. They did. For example, The Natural Step drove more ideas on green material choice, circular end of life, and social impacts, while Biomimicry drove more durability ideas and Whole System Mapping drove more cost reduction ideas, among other differences. Overall, The Natural Step generated the highest percentage of sustainability ideas, Biomimicry generated the most innovation ideas, and Whole System Mapping generated a balance of both. These preliminary results should help designers and engineers choose design methods suited to the types of design solutions they desire.

University incubators are an opportunity to promote the dissemination of research, change teaching practices and contribute to territorial economic development. In this article we present a structural and dynamic analysis of such an innovation system of a Swedish eco-innovation system by proposing elements for analysing the success of such innovation systems.

In recent years major companies such as Philips, H&M and Google have adopted a circular economy agenda to promote sustainability. Design consultancies such as IDEO has developed and promoted a circular design guide to help companies in this endeavour. However, designing for a circular economy often require design and reconfiguration of entire value chains – making the transition towards a circular economy rather difficult. In this paper we analyse a development project from the Danish island of Bornholm to investigate how to align diverse actors across the value chain in a process of co-creating systems for a circular economy. We combine design, value chain considerations and circular economy mindsets to informing negotiations of concerns among actors in the value chain.

Such strategical navigation might involve:

1. Staging initial spaces for dialogue with central actors from the value chain and initiates a process of mapping out their concerns

2. Staging a re-alignment space where the diverse actors can meet and interact to discuss and negotiate their concerns and their roles in the network

3. Design and enactment of a number of objects to faciliate negotiations