The Use of DfE Rules During the Conceptual Design Phase of a Product to Give a Quantitative Environmental Evaluation to Designers

In order to help designers to understand and translate the environmental constraints into effective actions, methods and tools have to be developed to enable the generation of more environmentally benign design alternatives according to Design for Environment rules. This article explains how to use DfE rules earlier during the conceptual design phase, when the designers don’t have simple qualitative tools or methods to evaluate their products. Two main actions have been realised: 1) to identify which kind of rules can be applied when designers only have a functional representation of their product 2). To create the necessary indicators to evaluate these rules depending on designers choices.