Sustainability assessment by analogy in early design stages

The paper presents a systematic approach for sustainability assessment of products since the very early phases of concept design. The procedure helps the designer in redesigning a product (but also the related processes and services) to reduce its overall impacts. Moreover, for the sustainability assessment since the concept phase, it makes use of a strategy based on assessing the product impacts by analogy with respect to similar products. The paper ends with a case study which illustrates the method and proposes a redesign of the product-process-service related to a pram. The consequences of the redesign spread also to the business level.