Sustainability Design Theory

Product Life Cycle Design

Life cycle design consists of product design and design of product life cycle. This laboratory is developing design methodologeies for life cycle design, with the cases of automobiles, electric home appliances, office equipment, and smart phones. The left figure illustrates upgrade design of three generations of a LCD TV.

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Design of Sustainable Society Scenario

We are developing a methodology for designing and describing scenarios envisioning sustainable society in a logical manner. The figre in the middle is the goal image and the figure in the right is the prototype system.

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Sustainable Design / Local Oriented Manufacturing

We view that diversity of the world will be continuously increasing. The traditional design by Japaenese OEMs will not win in the grobal but diverse competition. We started to study design methodoogies that supports a designer to design products that fit to local society, culture, economical situation, life styles, etc. By contributing to social sustainability in developing countries, this methodology will create a win-win situation between Japanese manufactures and developing countries.

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Conceptual Design Support

We are studying conceptual design support methodologies based on functional modeling.

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Life Cycle Engineering, focusing Maitenance

We have developed design methodology for "self maintenance machine" (the right figure is the commercial self maintenance photocopier). Maintenance of, e.g., infrastructure, and life cycle management of products are the reserach topics to be studied.

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