Developing Sustainable Products: An Interdisciplinary Challenge

This paper presents an interdisciplinary method that allows engineers to map their view, that is usually focused on product parameters and characteristics, to the view of sustainability assessment experts, whose view is on a higher abstraction level and mainly focused on officially accepted sustainability indicators. The presented approach proposes to bridge the conceptual gap between the different views of both disciplines by focusing on a product’s life-cycle processes such as manufacturing, distribution and end-of-life processes. Details about these processes need to be provided by respective experts that thus must be included into the interdisciplinary design process. The presented method builds on the House of Quality method and uses the existing Sustainability Dashboard software tool for a visual comparison of different design alternatives.