The development of sustainable products is gaining importance in product development due to increasing ecological, economic, and sociopolitical demands. EcoDesign is regarded as a key approach for integrating ecological principles into development. Despite its extensive application, the concept often lacks clarity and is defined inconsistently across scientific literature and practical implementations. Nevertheless, its significance has grown substantially in recent years, both semantically and methodologically, as well as in terms of its substantive content. This paper systematically investigates the concept of EcoDesign within sustainability-oriented product development. It aims to develop a structured and application-oriented understanding by examining how EcoDesign is defined in the literature, identifying its overarching characteristics and thematic priorities, and uncovering existing research gaps and future needs. The study traces the semantic and conceptual evolution of EcoDesign over the past two decades, highlighting its development in science and practice. A systematic literature review forms the foundation of this work. Selected publications were categorized and analyzed in terms of semantics and temporal context, enabling the identification of dominant thematic clusters and underexplored research areas, uncovering both key trends and fields requiring further investigation. Findings reveal significant conceptual ambiguity and inconsistent usage of the EcoDesign term. Moreover, theoretical concepts have only been partially translated into operational practices and are insufficiently integrated into specific product development phases, such as conceptual or embodiment design. This gap is evident in challenges practitioners face using EcoDesign principles, revealing a clear discrepancy between theory and practice in sustainability-oriented product development. By addressing these issues, this work contributes to the conceptual clarification and methodological grounding of EcoDesign in product development. It provides practical impulses for integrating ecological principles into engineering practice, lays a foundation for further applied research, and underscores the need to develop practical methods and tools that effectively translate sustainability knowledge into operational product design.
Thelemann et al. (2026) studied this question.