A Procedure for Early Environmental Assessment of Industrial Products

The issue of sustainability of industrial products is a subject of scientific research and debate since several years. This topic is very important for the implications that design decisions have on the environment and society when products are sold in the markets. Although today products can be assessed by methodologies such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and related software, a vivid interest in their environmental evaluation, already in conceptual design phase, is developing in recent times. The problem of assessment in early design has been discussed in two papers in recent literature, e.g. Devanthan et al. [1] and Bohm et al [2]. This fact gives us the opportunity to investigate on further aspects of this topic, especially on how designers can be supported in an early product evaluation. In conceptual phase, where ideas and solutions can begin to be analyzed, designers can focus their attention on some parameters related to sustainability. Therefore, appropriate tools and methods to support concept selection on the basis of an environmental assessment are required. Considering that to select an absolute index for environmental impact is not easy to reach in this stage and that a single quantitative method is not consolidated, in this paper, a proposal of methodology to assist designers is presented. The present method exploits the well-established visual tool as the Design Structure Matrix (DSM), which is considered by several researches very suitable in product decomposition and, in this case, it is used also to verify the correctness of a product conceptual schema. In the next sections, after a brief review on the latest researches on environmental assessments in early design process, the methodology is described in detail, defining data structures, presenting a formalization of rules that could guide it and providing an application to a case study.