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Ecodesign has been a preeminent factor for design research for many years, and a high number of tools to support the environmental impact assessment of products under design have been proposed. Despite this, there is still a lack of CAD-based tools focused on the conceptual stage of the design process. Currently, 3D polygonal modellers are usually utilised in early design stages, for product concept ideation and visualisation, and as a complement to parametric CAD systems. In this work this approach is leveraged to propose a tool implemented in such a 3D modelling package, enabling preliminary environmental impact assessment on conceptual design solutions. The goal is to build a CAD-based ecodesign tool adapted to the iterative nature of the conceptual design stage, facilitating the designers immediate environmental impact analysis and easy comparison of concept alternatives. The tool is provided as an add-on which connects the 3D modeller with external and customizable impact indicators databases. As part of a broader project related to the implementation of generative AI models in the field of design, the tool includes a module that connects the 3D model information of the object with various Large Language Models, sends them the environmental impact data calculated for the product and allows to perform queries related to its ecodesign, incorporating the possibility of complementary qualitative environmental analysis. The tool functionalities are demonstrated by means of a case study and they are compared against an existing CAD-based ecodesign solution. • There is a lack of CAD-based ecodesign tools for conceptual design stages. • EcoBlend, an add-on based on Blender as conceptual modeller is proposed. • EcoBlend enables immediate impact assessment based on 3D model geometry. • It includes AI Models (GPT-4, Claude and open-source models) as ecodesign advisors.
Alcaide-Marzal et al. (Mon,) studied this question.