Browsing by Author "Sheldrick, Leila"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Business as Unusual: Designing products with consumers in the loop.
    (Cranfield University, 2017-08-23 07:38) Moreno Beguerisse, Mariale; Makatsoris, Harris; Sheldrick, Leila; Dewberry, Emma; Sinclair, Matt
    This is one of five feasibility studies conducted as part of the recode network
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    Consumer Intervention Mapping—A tool for designing future product strategies within circular product service systems
    (MDPI, 2018-06-19) Sinclair, Matt; Sheldrick, Leila; Moreno, Mariale; Dewberry, Emma
    Re-distributed manufacturing presents a number of opportunities and challenges for New Product Development in a future Circular Economy. It has been argued that small-scale, flexible and localised production systems will reduce resource consumption, lower transport emissions and extend product lifetimes. At the same time smart products within the Internet of Things will gather and report data on user behaviour and product status. Many sustainable design tools have previously been developed but few are able to imagine and develop visions of how future sustainable product service systems might be manifested. This paper introduces the concept of Consumer Intervention Mapping as a tool for creating future product strategies. The tool visualises the points within a product’s lifecycle where stakeholders are able to intervene in the product’s expected journey. This perspective enables the rapid construction of scenarios that explore and describe future circular product service systems. Validation of the tool in three workshops is described and the outcomes are presented. Consumer Intervention Mapping is successful in creating scenarios that describe existing product service systems and new product concepts adapted to a Circular Economy paradigm. Further work is required to refine the tool’s performance in more focused and reflective design exercises.
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    Developing scenarios for product longevity and sufficiency
    (IOS Press, 2017-11-10) Dewberry, E. L.; Sheldrick, Leila; Sinclair, M.; Moreno, Mariale; Makatsoris, Charalampos
    This paper explores the narrative of peoples' relationships with products as a window on understanding the types of innovation that may inform a culture of sufficiency. The work forms part of the ‘Business as Unusual: Designing Products with Consumers in the Loop’ [BaU] project, funded as part of the UK EPSRC-ESRC RECODE network (RECODE, 2016) that aims to explore the potential of re-distributed manufacturing (RdM) in a context of sustainability. This element of the project employed interviews, mapping and workshops as methods to investigate the relationship between people and products across the product lifecycle. A focus on product longevity and specifically the people-product interactions is captured in conversations around product maintenance and repair. In exploring ideas of ‘broken’ we found different characteristics of, and motivations for, repair. Mapping these and other product-people interactions across the product lifecycle indicated where current activity is, who owns such activity (i.e. organisation or individual) where gaps in interactions occur. These issues were explored further in a workshop which grouped participants to look at products from the perspective of one of four scenarios; each scenario represented either short or long product lifespans and different types of people engagement in the design process. The findings help give shape to new scenarios for designing sufficiency-based social models of material flows.