Design for environment from the designers perspective

In order to make environmentally friendly products, everyone involved in the product developing process has to take the environmental aspects into consideration. Along with other aspects such as function, economics, quality etc. the environmental issue has to be implemented throughout the entire process. It is important to help the designers to make decisions that eventually lead to environmentally sound products. Many companies in Sweden have formulated their environmental policies, and try to integrate this issue in the daily work of the product developers. In order to find out how the environmental policy of a company actually affects the designers, a series of interviews with product developers has been made. The main object of these interviews is to answer the following questions: In what way do environmental aspects affect product developers in different stages of the product development process today? Is there a need for further information, guidelines, time etc. to make a more environmentally adapted design possible? What attitude do the designers have concerning the environmental issues? Environmental aspects have now been generally incorporated in the product development process. However designers often have to give priority to economy, function and quality, limiting severely the possibility to integrate the environmental aspects. The goal of the present series of interviews is therefore to study the situation of the designer in industrial product development.