The growing pressure on natural resources and increasing global trade have made sustainability issues a prime area of concern for all businesses alike. The increased focus on sustainability has impacted the way projects are conceived, planned, executed and evaluated in industries. Since project management literature has hardly been considered in design for sustainability research, this article attempts to review the points of intersection between these two fields, and explores the potential that knowledge from project management literature has in improving efficiency and effectiveness of development and implementation of design for sustainability tools

The need for understanding the context of the case company during Design for Sustainability (DfS) implementation has been a long identified need among the researchers in the field. Yet, studies on company context have primarily focused on studying, enlisting, and prescribing standardized solutions for companies or clustering companies based on similarities. Such approaches have not been able to overcome the organizational “soft side” challenges that have been long addressed in DfS literature. This explorative paper takes insights from 20 case interviews conducted in Norwegian and Danish manufacturing companies and with sustainability experts and uses the concept of persona from design studies to explore the potential of defining “company personas” to better define the context of the company. The interview analysis produced 14 dimensions, including both hitherto identified factual needs of companies and soft-side elements required to create a company persona, thereby informing practitioners and researchers to take a DfS implementation approach tailored to the company context.

Companies are increasingly expected to develop products with better environmental performance throughout their life cycle. Academic literature on ecodesign integration, which investigates firms’ practices of dealing with environmental concerns associated with their products, indicates a need for more focus on formal and informal organizational aspects. From the general management literature, the four-lens view of organizations provides a rich understanding of organizations by embracing their formal (structural lens) and informal (human, political and symbolic lenses) functioning. This article aims to explore the extent to which the four-lens view may support ecodesign integration in companies. This exploratory study builds on fifteen interviews about ecodesign integration at seven manufacturing companies in Denmark and Norway. The main results are threefold: (i) the different lenses of organizations could be found in measures mentioned at the case companies; (ii) measures from the architect’s perspective seemed necessary to provide an official scene for ecodesign and help prioritizing it in organizations; and (iii) the catalyst’s, advocate’s, and prophet’s perspectives seemed necessary to facilitate or complement the architect’s perspective. In the light of these findings, the four-lens view seems relevant to strengthen ecodesign integration, and its potential use as a reflective tool is an avenue for future work.

Shipbuilding industry in Norway, mainly operating in the Engineer-to-order environment, is one of the most innovative in the world in terms of technology and production methods. In this paper we investigate the applicability of the concept of remanufacturing in the shipbuilding industry. The research takes a case study approach to study the topic and also presents an overview of the existing literature on remanufacturing and its benefits for businesses and environment. A five stage framework is proposed for integrating the concept of remanufacturing into the strategic decision making process in shipbuilding companies. This framework would streamline the decision making process of shipbuilding companies entering the vessel remanufacturing business.