Developing integrated sustainable product-process-service systems at the early product design stages

The paper describes a systematic approach that aims to foster the development of sustainable integrated systems of products and services since the very early phases of conceptual design. The procedure helps the designer in redesigning a product (as well as the related processes and services) to reduce its overall impacts. The method takes into account environmental, social and economic aspects concerning a wide range of stakeholders. The proposed approach adopts the functional analysis methodology, which is used to: 1) characterise the product (either an artefact or a service) as an integrated product-process-service system; 2) identify the design analogies with existing products in order to identify the similarities in terms of sustainability impacts. The improved design concept, along with the related environmental, economic and societal characteristics, is used as a starting point for the successive detailed design. A case study illustrates the method and proposes a redesign of the product-process-service for carrying babies.