Our approach
Over the past two decades a tremendous amount of information and results on ecodesign principles, methodologies, tools, case studies, product data, training and teaching material have become available. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the amount of succesful industry examples, where ecodesign is integrated in every-day business. This especially applies to large industries such as the electronics industry, which has traditionally been a major subject for ecodesign related research across European universities.
Our EcoDesign Special Interest Group (SIG) takes an active approach to discussing the actual implementation of our own research topics in ecodesign to real products. We do this by taking physical products and gathering various international researchers together, after asking them to relate their own research topics and the results they write about in their papers to the actual product. To these workshops, we also invite the product developers of the product to the workshop, in the hope that they will attend and learn from the many expert approaches to their product, in terms of ecodesign implementation.
You will learn from browsing this website, that we have already treated products of various types in this manner; and we intend to continue with more products.
From this approach we expect to achieve the following:
- to create an active discussion of our own research activities, based on a concrete product
- to show a mulit-aspect approach to ecodesign, highlighting conflicting and complementary approaches to environmental product improvement
- to further our understanding of each others’ work in the area of ecodesign, internationally.
Participants/audience:
At our SIG meetings and workshops, we always invite and welcome two types of particpant:
- Fully active: those researchers and practitioners who are willing to apply their ecodesign knowledge actively in the workshop, by means of implementing it on the case product
- Semi-active: those who would like to attend, observe and learn from the workshop and take part in the discussions, but who are interested in taking on a case product.
It is our aim to foster a large knowledge sharing activity through the SIG's events, with the ultimate focus of making ecodesign methods, tools and techniques realistic, by trying them out on real life products.