LeNS presentation - Innovation Approach for Sustainable Product and PSS Development
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The document proposes an innovation approach for developing sustainable products and product-service systems (PSS). The approach integrates strategic sustainable development, user-centered design, and agile development principles. It involves identifying fundamental human needs and sustainability parameters, mapping the system through tools like causal loop diagrams, and using an integrated design team to manage complexity through continuous improvement, adaptation, and reflection. The goal is to design products and related services that balance societal and environmental needs.
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LeNS presentation - Innovation Approach for Sustainable Product and PSS Development
- 1. An innovation approach for sustainable product and PSS development Kara Davis, Pinar Öncel, Qingqing Yang
- 2. APPROACH COMPONENTS SSD – Strategic Sustainable DevelopmentUCD – User Centered DesignAgile – A management philosophy often used in manufacturing and software development
- 3. SYSTEM productsand related services designed by organizationsforsocietywithin theecosphere
- 4. SYSTEM
- 5. SUSTAINABILITY PARAMETERS What throws the system out of balance? The Four Sustainability Principles www.thenaturalstep.org
- 7. Protection
- 8. Affection
- 9. Creativity
- 11. Understanding
- 12. Participation
- 14. SYSTEM MAPPING http://bit.ly/experiencemap (nForm 2010)
- 15. SYSTEMMAPPING Causal Loop Diagram with emphasis on how improved machine performance (e.g. reduced moving weight) could reduce energy use, thereby indirectly both (i) increasing customer demand for water jet cutting and (ii) decreasing CO2 emissions and its related contribution to climate change. (Byggeth et al. 2007)
- 16. BUSINESS PARAMETERS Maintain and Gain Market Share
- 17. Plan-based approach Agile approach
- 19. R&D
- 20. production
- 22. MANAGING COMPLEXITY do plan do plan STEPPING STONES toSUCCESS
- 23. MANAGING COMPLEXITY manage risk stay open to new opportunities quickly adapt to change
- 24. MANAGING COMPLEXITY reflect adapt adapt reflect
- 25. CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT services products develop related services, new versionsof products, collect and respond to feedback.
- 27. SustainabilityProgram at BTH: http://www.bth.se/sustainability Our Complete Thesis: http://bit.ly/pssinnovation
Editor's Notes
- We came up with guidelines for an innovation approach that might help design teams consider a broader system and, in doing so, see opportunities to supplement physical products with services or address stakeholder needs across a product lifecycle. I won’t be able to run through the approach in detail in this presentation, but I will go over the key elements that we combined from Strategic Sustainable Development, User Centered Design, and Agile and explain how they come together to support each other.
- So first, when we design for sustainability, we’re required to consider a system that’s larger than just our business and customers and current trends. We’re looking at products and services designed by organizations for society within the ecosphere.
- So we create products and services that serve business needs by answering user needs WHILE supporting the greater needs of Society and Nature. Looking at a design problem with this full systems perspective also opens avenues for innovation. The more fully a design team understands a challenge, the more able they are to satisfy target needs without inhibiting others. So what are those NEEDS?
- The needs of Nature and of Society are actually pretty straightforward, or they can be. To come up with some parameters that we can check our product against, we need to understand what disrupts natural cycles or keeps society from fulfilling its needs. In our approach, we use four sustainability principles from an organization called “the Natural Step” to provide these parameters. The first thing we want to avoid is increasing the flows of materials from the earth’s crust into the ecosphere. This includes fossil fuels and heavy metals that will eventually become toxic to life as they increase in concentration.The second thing we are concerned with is society’s production of chemicals and substances that won’t break down easily in nature.In sustainability principle 3, we look at anything we are doing that physically degrades the environment, such as strip mining, deforestation, or paving over open land.And finally, we investigate barriers inherent to our process that might keep people from meeting their own human needs. Again, though, we have to define those needs.
- Manfred Max-Neef’s work shares nine fundamental human needs that he has observed universally in societies around the world. It also provides us with a classification of “satisfiers.” When we design a product or a service, we are designing satisfiers, or helping people satisfy their own needs. However, there are bad satisfiers and good satisfiers. Inhibiting satisfiers, for example, may over-satisfy one need while keeping someone from fulfilling others. Buying a $500 dress might fulfill my need for Identity, but if it hurts my ability to pay rent, it is an inhibiting satisfier. Taking this idea down the lifecycle, if the dye used on that dress pollutes the water of someone living in the factory town, it’s also a problem.Understanding more about the system of a product by mapping its lifecycle and identifying stakeholders along the way can help us to design satisfiers that are not only neutral, but might also answer multiple needs for various stakeholders.
- Now, every product designer is familiar with the idea that they are creating a product that will satisfy “needs” to some extent. However, the definition of need is still vague, and user-centered design has come under attack in the past for working against sustainability. The logic there is this: If we only pay attention to what people say they want, we could design something incredibly convenient, but very wasteful. In our approach, we suggest conducting user research for each stakeholder group along a product’s lifecycle, and then classifying identified needs as preferences, functional requirements, or human needs. In this way, we hope to counter the potential negative sway of preferences with the consideration of human needs, as those needs are very much reliant on the health of the environment. There are a few artifacts used in SSD and in UCD that can help us investigate and map these needs as well as other interactions in the system. Here’s an example of how “personas,” often used in a UCD process, can help remind design teams of motivations and barriers for different customer and non-customer stakeholders while mapping out their various needs.
- We can further expand our understanding of each representative user by investigating their interactions with the product. This is an example of an “experience map” created for a video game project with Comcast, an American media company.
- Causal loop diagrams, used in SSD, are another way to build an understanding of a system to identify points where change can havea great impact. All of these examples are methods that help a design team understand the context of their problem.
- The business can then use this understanding that to do what they want to do – maintain and gain market share. Now the question that often comes up here is this. It takes time and effort to understand a system this big. AND, a lot of the burden of this is bound to fall on the already overburdened Industrial Designer in the group. One barrier to working within this more complex system is simply that it can’t be understood and planned for all at once at the beginning of a project.
- We often end up with this situation, where our understanding of what we need changes over the course of a project. The more complex a problem it is, the greater difference between our eventual understanding of the ideal solution and the solution that we’ve designed. Instead, we need an approach that allows for and even encourages change within a process as more is learned about context, or the system around a product. Agile is a management philosophy that can help us with that. There are several well-known agile methods already being used in both manufacturing and software development. Some that you may have heard of are Kaizen, Scrum, or Lean. The key benefits in our case are that these methods generally place emphasis on working in close, cross-functional teams and that they facilitate constant reflection on the product as well as the process as a design team works.
- So first, it’s worth noting the importance of having integrated design teams working closely together. This can aid a full understanding of the system, promote innovation, and increase efficiency. It also takes the burden off of the Industrial Designer to have an answer for all of these more complex questions.
- Then, to work within complexity, that design team can set their goals at a high level by simply identifying the needs that they intend to satisfy within sustainability constraints. From there, they can backcast, understanding where they are and brainstorming measures that may take them towards their goal.Backcasting allows a team to plan flexibly with the end vision always in sight. Forecasting, by contrast, predicts where a certain action may take them.
- When design teams backcast from a vision of success, they typically work towards a defined need, brainstorming and priotizing measures that will work as stepping stones to bring them towards their goal.
- Still, during this process, design teams have to be able to able to manage risk, quickly adapt to change and remain open to new opportunity. Say we’re designing a water bottle, imagine if someone discovers that there is BPA in the plastic seal under the cap of the bottle. Or if someone learns that shipping costs could be reduced by using stronger, but thinner glass. Or, if someone determines that there is opportunity in offering a service to refill these bottles. A company would want their process to be flexible enough to respond to these threats and opportunities. This is where establishing regular check-ins for reflection can help. Many Agile methods use time-boxed iterations to achieve this.
- So if each stepping stone represents a time period of two or three weeks, the opportunity to reflect and adapt the product and design process is built in at that point.This turns what might be a stage-gate approach into a circular iterative process, allowing our team to test and get feedback, building on the previous iteration and brainstorming new ideas as more is learned.This is also a time to expand our view of the system check in against our sustainability constraints. It allows us to step back and notice opportunities for innovation, dematerialization and the addition of services to support physical products.
- Preserve is an example of a product company in the US that makes all of their products out of #5 plastic. They partner with a yogurt cup manufacturer and implement takeback programs to supplement their supply chain and close the loop on materials. But this whole system didn’t necessarily need to be planned in advance. Keeping with the idea of continuous improvement, a product can always be improved, or services may be added to create value or facilitate relationships in the product system. And there should be always be ways of collecting and integrating customer feedback over time.
- So, to wrap things up with a large, detailed diagram, our findings supported the idea that UCD and Agile could support Strategic Sustainable Development well as part of a product development process. The combination of tools and concepts from all three fields can help design teams to work effectively while considering the more complex system that sustainability demands, constantly balancing the design of their solution with their ever-increasing understanding of context.