Toward proactive (eco)design process: modeling information transformations among designers activities

Abstract

The growing number of tools and methods for environmental impact analysis shows the variety of contexts covered by ecodesign. As ecodesign tools are evolving rapidly and manipulating different data, environmental engineers are facing some difficulties to share data efficiently with the current product designers tools. To support this data exchange among software, the capacity of tools to interoperate has been widely improved over the last ten years by software integrations. However, this paper argues that the lack of dynamism and flexibility of those solutions cannot fully face the challenge of designing ecoeffective products. Therefore, this paper proposes a three-step method to build dynamic information exchanges between environmental engineers and product designers activities involved along the design process. This proposal can be adapted to the various ecodesign contexts encountered during the design process. It also gives the capacity to the environmental engineer to use any available information produced by other designers and to give them back an adapted answer to reiterate their choices. In this paper, the proposal has been tested on an industrial case study. The results are used to discuss the benefits of developing such a method in the industry to build a constant proactivity along the design process between the environmental engineer and product designers.