Designers' Utilization of and Requirements on Design for Environment (DfE) Methods and Tools

The objectives of this paper are twofold: to identify engineering designers utilization of Design for Environment (DfE) methods and tools, and to investigate what basic design-related requirements a DfE method or tool should fulfill in order to become actively used in industry among engineering designers. Most of the requirements for designers are related to their aims of fulfilling product performance and minimizing development time. There are four major requirements that a DfE method or tool, as well as a common method or tool, must exhibit. First, it must be easy to adopt and implement; second, it must facilitate designers to fulfill specified requirements on the presumptive product. Third, it must reduce the risk that important elements in the product development phase are forgotten. The two latter requirements relate to a method or tool's degree of appropriateness, but also to the fourth requirement, which is considered here the most important: that the use of the method or tool must reduce the total calendar time (from start to end) to solve the task. The conclusion is that DfE methods and tools must be designed to better comply with its main users - in this case the designers