Design for Green Usability: A New User Centered Methodology for Product Development

Nowadays, sustainability is the new trend in product design and treats the environmental issues in a more spherical manner. This is achieved by considering the whole lifecycle of the product in advance. When design is implemented, this approach becomes the conceptual base for developing a great deal of products and services. Many ‘design for X’ methodologies have been developed, refined, and now they are commonly used. The current paper reviews a series of available design methodologies. It classifies them based on the life cycle stage that they are implemented. The vast majority of them have a strong focus on manufacturing issues. Even when they focus on the product-use phase, they are dominated by the manufacturer’s decisions. The users’ interaction with a product may strongly influence its environmental impact, and for this reason designers should put extra effort in order to influence this behavior. Based on this demand there is a necessity for the development of novel methodologies and tools, which would be directly related to the use phase of the products. In recent years, a design methodology called User-Centered Design (UCD) is under consideration with an aim to understand the users’ needs, goals, limitations, possibilities, previous experiences and how they are affecting the user interaction with objects. The present paper proposes a new methodology named Design for Green Usability (DfGU), which is directly linked to the user requirements during the use phase of the product.