Proposal of a Support Method for Identifying Design Requirements on Life Cycle Planning

Designing a product life cycle, which is called life cycle design, is a promising approach to increase performance of the entire product life cycle from environmental and economic aspects. A product life cycle involves various processes such as not only manufacturing and use but also disassembly, recycling, refurbishing , and so forth . Therefore, designers should identify design requirements in terms of both a product and these processes in an integrated manner. Examples of design requirements include “ connection with one type of screws” for easy maintenance done by users and “ long physical lifetime ” of reused components. This paper proposes a support method for identifying design requirements at the early stage of life cycle design. We call the early design stage “life cycle planning stage.” This method employs a life cycle scenario, which supports designers to draw every scenes of a product life cycle. T his method supports stepwise refinement of a product life cycle w ith a life cycle scenario to identify design requirements as conditions for improving the current product life cycle .