Augmenting design with sustainability

Abstract The concept of sustainability changes the domain of optimal performance both for industry and services, adding environmental, social, and cultural dimensions and long-term effects to design and decision-making. Existing tools for design and environmental and social-cultural assessments can be integrated into a sustainability assessment. Providing us with a much more powerful tool, instead of designing a product and trying to produce it as sustainable as possible, sustainability becomes the point of departure possibly leading to entire new products and unconventional process configurations. To implement such a sustainability assessment, we developed a model based decision support tool for designing domestic water systems.