The sustainable co-design of products and production systems

Abstract The challenges in designing products and production systems are becoming increasingly complex due to more changeable customer demands, frequent product updates, and the requirements for resource efficiency. Established design processes are often unable to readily accommodate these rapid changes. In addition, incremental benefits are often achieved through existing sustainable design approaches due to inability to fully assess the impacts of product design improvements and their associated implications within production facilities. This highlights the need for more integrated design processes that enable seamless co-development of products and production systems. This paper examines the current interrelation and interaction of these design processes from the resource efficiency viewpoint, proposes a novel sustainable ‘Co-Design’ model, and discusses the ecological benefits of co-designing future products and production systems.