Since the first EcoDesign International Symposium held in 1999, this symposium has led the research and practices of environmentally conscious design of products, services, manufacturing systems, supply chain, consumption, as well as economics and society. EcoDesign 2011 - the 7th International Symposium on Environmentally Conscious Design and Inverse Manufacturing - was successfully held in the Japanese old capital city of Kyoto, on November 30th – December 2nd, 2011. The subtitle of EcoDesign 2011 is to “design for value innovation towards sustainable society.” During this event, presenters discussed the way to achieve both drastic environmental consciousness and value innovation in order to realise a sustainable society.

This book discusses the most significant ways in which design has been applied to sustainability challenges using an evolutionary perspective. It puts forward an innovation framework that is capable of coherently integrating multiple design for sustainability (DfS) approaches developed so far. It is now widely understood that design can and must play a crucial role in the societal transformations towards sustainability. Design can in fact act as a catalyst to trigger and support innovation, and can help to shape the world at different levels: from materials to products, product–service systems, social organisations and socio-technical systems. This book offers a unique perspective on how DfS has evolved in the past decades across these innovation levels, and provides insights on its promising and necessary future development directions. For design scholars, this book will trigger and feed the academic debate on the evolution of DfS and its next research frontiers. For design educators, the book can be used as a supporting tool to design courses and programmes on DfS. For bachelor’s and master’s level design, engineering and management students, the book can be a general resource to provide an understanding of the historical evolution of DfS. For design practitioners and businesses, the book offers a rich set of practical examples, design methods and tools to apply the various DfS approaches in practice, and an innovation framework which can be used as a tool to support change in organisations that aim to integrate DfS in their strategy and processes.

This book consists of chapters based on selected papers presented at the EcoDesign2015 symposium (9th International Symposium on Environmentally Conscious Design and Inverse Manufacturing). The symposium, taking place in Tokyo in December 2015, has been leading the research and practices of eco-design of products and product-related services since it was first held in 1999. The proceedings of EcoDesign2011 were also published by Springer. Eco-design of products and product-related services (or product life cycle design) are indispensable to realize the circular economy and to increase resource efficiencies of our society. This book covers the state of the art of the research and the practices in eco-design, which are necessary in both developed and developing countries. The chapters of the book, all of which were peer-reviewed, have been contributed by authors from around the world, especially from East Asia, Europe, and Southeast Asia. The features of the book include (1) coverage of the latest topics in the field, e.g., global eco-design management, data usage in eco-design, and social perspectives in eco-design; (2) an increased number of authors from Southeast Asian countries, with a greater emphasis on eco-design in emerging economies; (3) high-quality manuscripts, with the number of chapters less than half of that of the previous book.

This volumes consists of 59 peer-reviewed papers, presented at the International Conference on Sustainable Design and Manufacturing (SDM-16) held in Chania, Crete Greece in April 2016. Leading-edge research into sustainable design and manufacturing aims to enable the manufacturing industry to grow by adopting more advanced technologies, and at the same time improve its sustainability by reducing its environmental impact. SDM-16 covers a wide range of topics from sustainable product design and service innovation, sustainable process and technology for the manufacturing of sustainable products, sustainable manufacturing systems and enterprises, decision support for sustainability, and the study of societal impact of sustainability including research for circular economy. Application areas are wide and varied. The book will provide an excellent overview of the latest research and development in the area of Sustainable Design and Manufacturing.

The role of design, both expert and nonexpert, in the ongoing wave of social innovation toward sustainability. In a changing world everyone designs: each individual person and each collective subject, from enterprises to institutions, from communities to cities and regions, must define and enhance a life project. Sometimes these projects generate unprecedented solutions; sometimes they converge on common goals and realize larger transformations. As Ezio Manzini describes in this book, we are witnessing a wave of social innovations as these changes unfold—an expansive open co-design process in which new solutions are suggested and new meanings are created. Manzini distinguishes between diffuse design (performed by everybody) and expert design (performed by those who have been trained as designers) and describes how they interact. He maps what design experts can do to trigger and support meaningful social changes, focusing on emerging forms of collaboration. These range from community-supported agriculture in China to digital platforms for medical care in Canada; from interactive storytelling in India to collaborative housing in Milan. These cases illustrate how expert designers can support these collaborations—making their existence more probable, their practice easier, their diffusion and their convergence in larger projects more effective. Manzini draws the first comprehensive picture of design for social innovation: the most dynamic field of action for both expert and nonexpert designers in the coming decades.

In product development, decisions taken in design and manufacturing are considered the most influential factors for succeeding commercialisation. Product development is a complex integrated process of several steps starting from design where the market needs are identified and turned into competitive product specifications and different design concepts. In other words, design is about identifying a problem, developing solution proposals, and validating the most feasible solution with real users. Manufacturing technologies, on the other hand, help designers to make those virtual models into physical parts by transforming different types of raw materials. This book on design and manufacturing, written by a number of experts from all over the world, presents a design perspective and different manufacturing applications from various industrial sectors.

This book constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the 11th IFIP WG 5.1 International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management, PLM 2014, held in Yokohama, Japan, in July 2014. The 51 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 77 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: BIM operations, maintenance, and renovation; BIM concepts and lifecycle management; design and education; naval engineering and shipbuilding; aeronautical and automotive engineering; industry and consumer products; interoperability, integration, configuration, systems engineering; change management and maturity; knowledge engineering; knowledge management; service and manufacturing; and new PLM.