| dc.description.abstract | An ‘environmentally-benign design’ is defined as that which causes little or no harm to the natural environment and may
be achieved by reducing the environmental impact of the design solutions conceptualised, to be eventually embodied into
a product. During the early stages of design, iterative design activities of generation, evaluation, modification and
selection are performed to affirm alternatives to a design solution from several fragmented and highly abstract ideas.
Thus, the designer takes critical decisions with respect to the various criteria, such as, cost, aesthetics, ergonomics,
environment, etc., and these cannot be easily rectified at later stages. Therefore, it is imperative to support sound decisionmaking
at this stage of design, as it is at the conceptual stage that most number of decisions are taken and in turn, the
environmental footprint of a design is committed. Thus, to support environmentally-benign design decisions at conceptual
stage, appropriate selection of concept from a number of solution-variants is critical, and requires the support of evaluation
of these solution-variants with respect to its environmental impact. However, these solution-variants are characterised as
being highly abstract, lacking concrete descriptions and having incomplete information with respect to life cycle, making
it challenging to estimate environmental impact with accuracy.
This dissertation illustrates, through empirical study, the merit in making available environmental impact values of
solutions for concept selection at an early stage which in turn, improves the design decisions and the environmentalbenignity
of the overall design. The contributions of this research are towards (i) design domain, through ontological
description of conceptual solutions grounded in quantifiable constructs (of SAPPhIRE), while capturing the inherent
abstraction of this stage; (ii) evaluation with respect to environment, by identifying uncertainty prevalent in conceptual
stage with respect to LCA and estimating the EI of a solution, with associated uncertainty, and (iii) supporting real-time
design decision-making by the prescribed ‘concepTe’ tool. An acronym for ‘conceptual design Tool for
environmentally-benign design’, the tool aims to support designer’s in taking real-time design decisions during
conceptualisation by aiding in the evaluation of the solutions being designed, by a proposed method for estimating
Environmental Impact (EI) of a solution, with uncertainty association. A ‘proof of concept’ of the intended tool is further
evaluated for its effectiveness, through empirical studies, and is found to show promise in supporting environmentally benign
design at conceptual stage | en_US |
