Start creating sustainable product designs

Edited by Mike Santora • Managing Editor

Design has always been a balance of performance, cost, and quality. But these metrics do not take the full, lifetime environmental impact of a product into account. Sustainability must be added to ensure that every impact of a product is addressed in even the most complex systems. The only e ective solution starts at the beginning, as nearly 80% of a product’s lifetime environmental impact is determined during the design phase — what materials are used, how it’s manufactured, energy e ciency, and what comes of it after its usefulness ends. The solution to these problems is to deploy sustainability as an additional business metric and use digitalization to get there faster than the competition.

Designing sustainable products requires an understanding of environmental impacts early, including insight into the product’s material and energy use, the manufacturing process’ environmental impacts, and its expected resource consumption. The designer must account for suppliers, distributors, and logistics providers while balancing sustainability, profitability, performance, and quality goals. Data and digitalization are key in a holistic approach to design, leveraging the Collective Intelligence of the Digital Enterprise. Achieving this requires reimagining product design to be built on a system of systems approach, connected industrial ecosystems, and holistic sustainability indicators.

Start with systems of systems design

A system can be as specific as a feature of the integrated circuit in an electronic device or as extensive as the environment that product will occupy. Most modern products cannot be described as a single system because of the many engineering disciplines required for development. Instead, these products are considered a system of systems. Coordinating diverse disciplines when working on a project requires simulation early and often to optimize individual systems and then balance how they interact.

This robust simulation is enabled by the comprehensive digital twin of the product, first and foremost.

There is also value in simulating production to gain insight into how the product is produced, logistics costs, usable lifetime, and how it fits into circular economies. Early exploration provides a more intelligently defined design space and binds it to what is viable, profitable, and sustainable for the business. Requirements and assessments must be seamlessly woven in from the beginning to make informed decisions. One material may be selected over another due to a superior strength to weight ratio for product performance. A material may be avoided due to the estimated CO2 emission cost of extraction over the recyclability of yet another material, and components might be designed for a specific manufacturing process like 3D printing to minimize waste.

Making the right sustainability decisions during the design phase requires access to the most accurate and broad collection of data to create a truly comprehensive digital twin, that includes the extended network of suppliers, logistics operations, and energy infrastructure. Such an approach delivers the collective intelligence needed to make better decisions, and as your digital twin is informed with data collected from simulation, manufacturing, and the value chain, it becomes an increasingly accurate representation.

The communications ecosystem must cover the entire value chain and be established early — coordinating actions and data exchange with the suppliers, distributors, and other partners. This gives designers direct access to sourcing information on materials and contracted sub-systems. Simultaneously, a robust product lifecycle management system built on digitalization, weaves all engineering work together to create today’s complex products while still considering the available resources of the enterprise. Integrating these siloed processes helps bring a better and more sustainable product to market faster.

Supplier decisions can have dramatic impacts on the sustainability of a product. One supplier might be able to employ renewable electricity because of their proximity to wind, solar, or other sustainable energy sources.

A well-connected industrial design ecosystem also provides feedback loops between design and the value chain. The mechanical designers may have requested and designed a product around one aluminum alloy in initial design iterations, but the supplier discovers a slightly di erent alloy with comparable properties but better print viability within the existing infrastructure. Whether the business decision is to change the alloy or contract a di erent manufacturing supplier that can reliably print in the initial alloy, this new data point is added to the collective intelligence for future iterations.

Supplier decisions can have dramatic impacts on the sustainability of a product. One supplier could employ renewable electricity because of their proximity to wind, solar, or