Challenges of functionality for eco-design

EcoSD network is a French association whose main objective is to encourage
collaboration between academic and industrial researchers so they may create
and spread advanced multidisciplinary knowledge in the eco-design fields at
national and international levels. Among other actions, EcoSD organizes an
annual thematic

workshop to enhance collaborative discussions. The present workshop was
organized in that frame. It was held in Nantes in 2014. It gathered around 50
participants.

The notion of function in eco-design can have different meanings, according to
the discipline (engineering, economy, sociology), and according to the life
cycle step. When a product is conceived, eco-designing imposes to foresee the
use and end-of-life phases. However, there are differences between the
"expected functions", and the actual "usage" of products, that could be
compared by analogy to the difference between "supply" and "demand" in
economy. This gap between function and usage could be explored to improve
environmental performances of products because adjusting the function is a
performance axis by itself, as well as to better define comparison basis
between similar (but different because multi-functional) products. This
problematic is transversal to eco-design: eco-usage, functional economy, Life
Cycle Assessment (functional unit and consequential LCA)... It can be resumed
by the following key questions: How to define functions? How to predict and
quantify functions, utilities and usages? How to compare complex objects?

The objectives of the workshop were to cross different visions from different
disciplines gathering the most recent researches in France. Researchers from
various research domains such as design for innovation, mechanical design,
life cycle assessment (LCA), functional economy or market economy, were
invited to present their work in various application fields: agricultural and
food industries, waste management, construction, mechanical engineering and
transports. Industrial from the automotive and buildings sectors were also
invited to explain how they consider functions in their actual practices.