Integrating sustainability in design thinking based product design

The aim of the research was to integrate sustainability into design thinking based product design in order that the resulting products are more sustainable. Products that are more sustainable is a critical goal since product lifecycles are a major cause of society’s current sustainability challenges. Based on arguments in the literature, we investigated how to integrate sustainability into existing design processes rather than developing stand-alone tools and methods. We focused on a design thinking based process since this type is becoming more popular. Through action research with a design consultancy who want to start working with sustainable product design, we iterated between three stages: seeking to understand, designing action, and trying out the action. The first stage comprised document analysis, focus-group style workshops, a survey and interviews. When designing the actions (enhancements to their design thinking based process), we drew on literature from sustainable product design, decision-making for sustainability, and organisational learning and change for sustainability. We also drew upon our research partners’ practical experience. The enhanced process was tried out and further developed through feedback and co-development meetings. The result is an enhanced process where project teams (i) use the outcomes from the insights/inspiration phase of the existing process to choose sustainable design strategies that are relevant for a particular project. We provide a decision support prototype to assist project teams in choosing strategies that enable them to work with sustainability in a way that also delivers business benefits, as well as to increase sustainable design competence of the team. We recommend that teams choose sustainable design strategies at the same time as choosing the market (and other) strategies, that is, at the beginning of the ideation phase. Once the teams have chosen which strategies to work with, for example, design for remanufacture, we suggest that they (ii) use the strategies to develop ideation foci/questions that help them explore the design space. We provide support, based on the literature, for how to use the strategies to form tailored sustainable design ideation sessions. The third enhancement is for teams to (iii) compare concepts with respect to sustainability as part of their concept comparison and evaluation (in the final part of the ideation phase). We conclude that it is better to integrate sustainability in the approaches used for generating ideas to address the needs (and choosing between ideas), rather than merely adding ‘sustainability’ as an additional need. We also found that sustainability should be integrated into the process such that teams are facilitated to work with sustainable design in a way that is relevant to their particular project (industry, market, customer needs) while also better understanding the advantages and limitations of that chosen way. This is in line with the purpose of design thinking to address complex problems, and also supports stronger competence development in the project team. Our contribution to sustainable product design academics and practitioners is insights into how to integrate sustainability into a design thinking based product design process and an example enhanced process.