Development of a design framework for sustainable product design and innovation

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The concept of 'Sustainable Development' has been around for decades and has become a part of our common usage in the media, government policy, corporate mission statements, and even in education curriculum.  However, the means of achieving the core values of Sustainable Development remains a global challenge.  Researchers and scientists advocating 'Sustainable Development' believe that one of the few ways to resolve this dilemma is through 'Sustainable Product Design and Innovation' in the manufacturing sector.'Product Design and Innovation' is the key battleground that all companies must master to remain sustainable in today's highly competitive world market.  Traditional 'Product Design and Innovation' can be viewed as a set of activities that involves more than 'Engineering Design'.  A commonly accepted definition for the process includes everything from the initial product vision, to business and marketing analysis, technical engineering design activities, manufacturing process planning, and validation.  The objective of this research is to find out how traditional 'Product Design and Product Innovation' procedure can be reorganized to incorporate Sustainable Development principles i.e., to consider "prevention" as a starting point, and moves to integrated product development that achieves reduced impacts across the whole product life cycle.  Specifically, we intend to develop an integrated framework for concept generation and evaluation in the 'Sustainable Product Design and Innovation' process.  The proposed framework is based on the integration of several engineering design and analysis methodologies including: TRIZ (a Russian acronym stands for 'Theory of the Solution of Inventive Problems', Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Rule-Based Systems, and Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA).