A QFD-centred design methodology for environmentally conscious product design

As our society becomes more environmentally conscious, manufacturers must incorporate ‘environmental qualities’ into products. This paper proposes a general design methodology to effectively support environmentally consciousness design of products. The methodology employs three tools: LCA (life cycle assessment), QFDE (quality function deployment for environment), and TRIZ (theory of inventive problem solving). QFDE is a tool developed by modifying and extending QFD, and is extended further in this paper. In addition, connecting two consecutive tools is realized by established relations among those tools. The presented methodology is proved through application to a hair dryer to effectively support the product planning and conceptual design stages. For instance, designers could utilize one of the LCA results that the product has a high impact on global warming through energy consumption during its use phase to define a requirement objectively in QFDE, ‘reduce the energy consumption’ with a high weighting. TRIZ allowed designers to generate four improvement solutions. The most highly evaluated was using resonance frequency on the motor. This was obtained from a QFDE result that ‘dry quickly’ and ‘dry quietly’ have a contradiction. The methodology has a larger benefit than is obtained from utilizing those three tools independently.