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Green innovation design
Environmental issues have long been of concern to the design community. As early as the 1970s,
Papanek advocated sustainable design to protect the environment. Kurk and Eagan also applied
the power of industrial design to propose green products for people in third-world countries, trying
to improve the lives of those who live at the lowest end of the pyramid of consumption using the
methods of green design. In 2007, the National Design Museum in New York held an exhibition called
“Design for the Other 90%”. This mainly showed how product design can help solve problems such as
education, energy, water, health, sanitation, housing, and transportation. It also demonstrated many
outstanding green design works, and the results were significant, as they attracted more interested to
design in relation to social issues. Green design is an approach which can reduce the environmental
impact of products to facilitate the sustainable development of the society. In the years since, how the
power of green design can be used to reduce the impact of products on the environment has become
an ever more important issue for the sustainable survival of mankind.
With the increase of environmental awareness and the establishment of environmental protection
laws, green product design not only plays a critical role in the manufacturing industry, but has also
become a main focal point in the future . Consumers’ requirements are no longer met only by
functional and industrial design, as they now also consider whether products conform to environmental
principles and regulations. In addition, the implementation and promotion of environmental laws
has made green product design a necessary practice for industries in many countries . Therefore,
it is necessary for product designers to take into account environmental impacts and green factors
in the initial stages of the product design lifecycle. This can help ensure that products comply with
environmental principles, facilitate subsequent product maintenance and disassembly, and improve
product reuse, recycling, and regeneration.
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The design method plays an important role in the process of designing and developing products,
and is a key tool in determining whether an item can successfully become a green product or not. In
general, design methods are related to the way designers work, and can be interpreted as a mechanism
for applying systematic concepts to innovative design , built up by insighting, ideating, prototyping,
and evaluating processes to find the best ideas for the final design resolutions . Design methods can
be vital tools that can provide designers with specific guidance and steps to create new possibilities,
and to provide new options and new solutions for products . Some authors have also focused
on creating green design methods to assist designers in green product design and development.
The extension method can provide an innovative green design method by decomposing and
recomposing a system or product. It has rigorous deconstruction methods and logic, which can help
product designers construct innovative green concepts in the early stages of product design. This
paper thus aims at proposing an innovative green design method based on the extension method and
Green DNAs. An effective and feasible design approach is therefore provided to designers for creating
practical green products.
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents a literature review of the main definitions
and classifications of green products and related works, whereas Section 3 proposes a new green design
method and the concept of Green DNAs, which represent detailed design processes for designers to
follow when developing green products. In Section 4, the practical design of a medical air purifier is
demonstrated to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach with regard to
sustainability, while in Section 5, the results and discussions of the prototype of the green product
created by the proposed green design method are provided. Finally, Section 6 reports the conclusions.
- Related Works of Green Product Design
Today, becoming “green” is both a trend and an opportunity for companies. There are many reasons
for this, such as competitiveness, the related laws, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) .
Many companies are thus trying to incorporate the factors of environmental sustainability into their
product design . In this atmosphere, the design and development of green products has become
more and more important, and this is reflected in both practice and the literature . In particular,
green product design is attracting more interest as a means to enhance company performance and
competitiveness . However, there is still much debate about the definition of green products ,
and many uncertainties about which green factors companies should consider when developing
such products.
2.1. Definitions and Classifications of Green Products
In terms of sustainability, multiple meanings of the word “green” have been explained and
discussed in the literature . In particular, McDonagh and Prothe define several
dimensions of “green”, embracing economics, society, industry, ecology, profit, consumer, trade,
equality, and sustainability. These concepts are very wide and involve many levels, but these “green”
meanings have also caused confusion for many firms and cannot provide a clear guidance for
those wanting to become greener, and there are many descriptions that aim to identify what green
products are . Moreover, there are still concerns about the green factors that construct eco-friendly
products . With regard to the various characteristics and definitions of green products, the European
Commission defines them as those that use less energy and resources, have lower environmental
impacts and risks, and prevent waste generation during the early product design phase. This definition
emphasizes the importance of designing products as “green” from the initial conceptualization phase
on, and that even here they have “green” attributes. Overall, this is the best definition of green
product design.
Some researchers have attempted to further define “green products”. Ottman et al.
addresses the main aspects of green product development to reduce the environmental impact of such
activities, including in terms of energy, material, waste, and pollution. Shrivastava states that
the limits of the natural environment will drive existing products towards becoming green products
with better energy efficiency and less material usage. Kaebernick and Soriano adopt a simple
method to evaluate the green products and classify them based on their environmental characteristics.
They use two factors of energy and material to measure the environmental impact of products in
the four stages of their life cycles, namely material, manufacture, use, and disposal. Dewberry and
Goggin propose an Ecodesign Matrix to distinguish the environmental impact of products based
on two dimensions, including life cycle and environmental focus. The evaluating factors embrace
process, use, and disposal in the life cycle factors, and energy, material, pollution, and waste in the
environmental focus. Most problems related to adverse environmental impact are due to energy,
material, process, use, disposal, pollution, and waste, all of which can be addressed through the use of
green technology, green materials, and green manufacturing. As such, this study defines these three
factors as the three Green DNAs of green products.