Sustainable design methods and tools abound, but their implementation in practice remains marginal. This article brings together results from previous literature reviews and analyses of sustainable design methods and tools, as well as input from design researchers and professional practitioners to identify the needs and gaps in the area. It results in a shared vision of how sustainable design methods and tools can be more tightly integrated into mainstream product design and development, as well as the current state of practice and research in relation to four central questions: What are the needs and values of industry regarding sustainable design? What improvements in sustainable design methods and tools would most drive industry forward? How should researchers move forward with developing more useful sustainable design methods and tools? How can sustainable design be more effectively integrated into industry? A roadmap for the international sustainable design research community is proposed with descriptions of short-, medium-, and long-term tasks for addressing each question. The purpose is to support collective progress and discussions on method and tool development and adoption, and to enable more tangible success in mainstreaming sustainable design practices in industry.

Many different product development approaches are taught and used in engineering and management disciplines. These formalized design methods, processes, and environments differ in the types of projects for which they are relevant, the project components they include, and the support they provide users. This paper details a review of sixteen well-established product development approaches, the development of a decision support system to help designers and managers navigate these approaches, and the administration of a survey to gather subjective assessments and feedback from design experts. The included approaches—design thinking, systems thinking, total quality management, agile development, waterfall process, engineering design, spiral model, vee model, axiomatic design, value-driven design, decision-based design, lean manufacturing, six sigma, theory of constraints, scrum, and extreme programming—are categorized based on six criteria: complexity, guidance, phase, hardware or software applicability, values, and users. A decision support system referred to as the Product Development Approach Advisor (PD Advisor) is developed to aid designers in navigating these approaches and selecting an appropriate approach based on specific project needs. Next, a survey is conducted with design experts to gather feedback on the support system and the categorization of approaches and criteria. The survey results are compared to the original classification of approaches by the authors to validate and provide feedback on the PD Advisor. The findings highlight the value and limitations of the PD Advisor for product development practice and education, as well as the opportunities for future work.

During the late stages of product development, dimensional tolerances are chosen to balance quality requirements with manufacturing costs. Designers typically judge how much variation in the product dimensions should be allowed while still maintaining the perception of high quality for the product or brand, but this is rarely based on a quantitative understanding of how consumers actually perceive variation and quality. Likewise, environmental sustainability priorities, which can also be affected by dimensional tolerances through production waste and product lifespan, are often chosen without knowing how such attributes are received by consumers. This paper presents a survey-based technique for understanding how tolerance and pricing decisions influence market demand and manufacturer profits, accounting for consumer perceptions of visual quality and environmental friendliness. A case study of a mobile phone design is explored, including variation propagation simulation, manufacturing cost and environmental impact estimation, online choice-based conjoint (CBC) survey design and administration, consumer demand model construction, and profit maximization for the markets in China, Sweden, and the United States. The results show how consumers make trade-offs in purchasing decisions when choosing among mobile phone attributes including price, environmental friendliness, and visual quality, and different scenarios are compared based on survey design, country of interest, and the company׳s global product strategy

Background: Engineering education traditionally emphasizes technical skills, sometimes at the cost of under‐preparing graduates for the real‐world engineering context. In recent decades, attempts to address this issue include increasing project‐based assignments and engineering design courses in curricula; however, a skills gap between education and industry remains.Purpose/Hypothesis: This study aims to understand how undergraduate engineering students perceive product design before and after an upper‐level project‐based design course, as measured through concept maps. The purpose is to measure whether and how students account for the technical and nontechnical elements of design, as well as how a third‐year design course influences these design perceptions.Design/Method: Concept maps about product design were collected from 105 third‐year engineering students at the beginning and end of a design course. Each concept map's content and structure were quantitatively analyzed to evaluate the students' conceptual understandings and compare them across disciplines in the before and after conditions.Results: The analyses report on how student conceptions differ by discipline at the outset and how they changed after taking the course. Mechanical Engineering students showed a decrease in business‐related content and an increased focus on societal content, while students in the Engineering Management and Industrial and Systems Engineering programs showed an increase in business topics, specifically market‐related content.Conclusion: This study reveals how undergraduate students conceptualize product design, and specifically to what extent they consider engineering, business, and societal factors. The design courses were shown to significantly shape student conceptualizations of product design, and they did so in a way that mirrored the topics in the course syllabi. The findings offer insights into the education‐practice skills gap and may help future educators to better prepare engineering students to meet industry needs.

Core values are an important part of Volvo Car Group's and Volvo Group Truck Technology's strategic development plans. Both of these companies share the same three core values: Quality, Safety and Environmental Care, but they approach these values in different ways due to different customer demands. This study seeks to understand how industry professionals and customers perceive these core values and the attributes that are associated with them, using semi-structured interviews with industry professionals from both companies and quantitative survey methods with customers. The purposes of this study are to investigate how designers convey core values to customers through product attributes and how customers perceive those core values through the same attributes. Such an understanding can contribute to more effective design processes that communicate company values in the early product development phases