Design for environmental sustainability. Life Cycle Design of Products

This book has been created for anyone who wants to enrich his/her culture and design know-how, and for those who would like to design products with a low environmental impact. This book is thus addressed to both design students and independent design professionals, working for a studio or a firm. This text was written and organised both in order to provide an overall and articulated framework of the discipline, and as a support tool for design practice. In addition to the general arguments, the possible strategies and the various guide- lines and design options are highlighted and structured in points. Consequently, the text is accompanied by a rich selection of case studies about products having a low environmental impact. These case studies were chosen with two objectives: to make the design options clear and to clarify their specificity in relationship with the different kinds of products. To make the second objective even clearer, also visually, the case studies are presented in grey boxes. Eventually, a method and the related tools which allow designers to translate theory into practice are described, together with the narration about how designers and firms can adopt this method in various operating conditions. Certain topics, strictly inherent to the reasoning but with a deeper level of detail, are described in specific boxes.