A Bibliometric Review of Sustainable Product Design

Consideration of sustainability in product development is becoming increasingly important and encompasses many aspects of product design. In this study, a bibliometric review of recent sustainable product design publications using Web of Science and VOSViewer is carried out. The review indicates that the majority of publications concerning sustainable product design is oriented towards environmental science-led subject areas and production-led journals. Analysis of author keyword co-occurrences reveals that circular economy, life cycle assessment, sustainable management, and optimization are the most popular topics in sustainable product design research. The analysis also reveals that the researchers fail to link sustainability research to activities in product design, which leads to the lack of access to relevant research that can make products more sustainable. Building on the findings, the authors propose four future research directions that aim to guide researchers to better correlate sustainability with product design, namely: sustainability interpretation, integration, assessment and validation, and improvement.

Sustainable Tourism Product Development: An Application of Product Design Concepts

This study examines sustainable tourism products in tourism destinations. Based on concepts of sustainable product design, our study proposes a framework for sustainable tourism products by adapting an existing Design for Sustainability Framework to consider and analyze the characteristics and themes of sustainable (tourism) products as well as their impact and scope. Using a pragmatic qualitative approach, 15 semi-structured interviews with destination managers from the German-speaking Alpine region formed the empirical basis of the study. The results emphasize key themes and multiple characteristics associated with sustainable tourism products in tourist destinations, addressing all sustainability components and design innovation levels. This study is the first to apply existing sustainable product design concepts to destination contexts and discuss their applicability for sustainable tourism products. For practitioners, this study provides support for the development of sustainable tourism products and contributes to a better understanding of the effects and levels of these products as well as sustainability marketing.

Metrics for Measuring Sustainable Product Design Concepts

Although products can contribute to ecosystems positively, they can cause negative environmental impacts throughout their life cycles, from obtaining raw material, production, and use, to end of life. It is reported that most negative environmental impacts are decided at early design phases, which suggests that the determination of product sustainability should be considered as early as possible, such as during the conceptual design stage, when it is still possible to modify the design concept. However, most of the existing concept evaluation methods or tools are focused on assessing the feasibility or creativity of the concepts generated, lacking the measurements of sustainability of concepts. The paper explores key factors related to sustainable design with regard to environmental impacts, and describes a set of objective measures of sustainable product design concept evaluation, namely, material, production, use, and end of life. The rationales of the four metrics are discussed, with corresponding measurements. A case study is conducted to demonstrate the use and effectiveness of the metrics for evaluating product design concepts. The paper is the first study to explore the measurement of product design sustainability focusing on the conceptual design stage. It can be used as a guideline to measure the level of sustainability of product design concepts to support designers in developing sustainable products. Most significantly, it urges the considerations of sustainability design aspects at early design phases, and also provides a new research direction in concept evaluation regarding sustainability.