Exploring the Effectiveness of Providing Structured DfE Design Strategies During Conceptual Design

Abstract

The fuzzy front end of engineering design can present a difficult challenge, and as such, recent engineering design research has focused on guiding and influencing the way a designer ideates. Early ideation can be especially difficult when attempting to integrate specific design objectives in product design, called Design for X (DfX). Some examples of DfX are Design for Manufacturing (DfM), Design for Assembly (DfA), Design for Function (DfF), and Design for Safety (DfS). This paper will present two experiments exploring the efficacy of a structured Design for the Environment (DfE) design method called the GREEn Quiz (Guidelines and Regulations for Early design for the Environment) that provides designers with sustainable design knowledge during the conceptual design phase. The GREEn Quiz operates on a web-based platform and queries the designer about their design concepts; an end-of-quiz report provides abstract DfE knowledge to designers. While this abstract knowledge was able to be applied by designers in a former study, we hypothesize that providing targeted, specific design strategies during conceptual design may enable better integration in concept generation by novice designers. In this study, we created these DfE strategies, embedded these in the GREEn Quiz, and studied the efficacy of these strategies when presented to designers at both the expert and novice levels. Experimental results suggest that respondents with access to the strategy-based GREEn Quiz produced concepts with evidence of more sustainable design decisions and higher solution quality scores when compared to previous respondents and the control groups. This research encourages the consideration of downstream environmental impact knowledge during conceptual design, resulting in lower-impact products regardless of the previous DfE expertise of the designer.