Adaptability evaluation of a product upgradability (Application of a laptop computer design)

Abstract

To make sustainable society come true, product design is required to consider environmental issues such as reduction of resource usage, product disposal, and environmental loads. Many approaches for resolving these issues such as reuse, remanufacturing, and upgradable designs are studied and implemented. To apply these design approaches to product appropriately, a designer has to understand their characteristics and evaluate the product's adaptability for these design options. Hence, this paper evaluates the advantage of these design approaches. The ultimate purpose of this study is proposal of an adaptability evaluation method of product reusability, remanufacturability, and upgradability to support designer's decision making of product or component life cycle options at the early phase of design process. Thus, this paper speculates the appropriate perspectives of these evaluations and proposes conceptual evaluation method based on the viewpoints of society (low environmental load emission), manufacturer (low production cost and high profit), and consumer (low life cycle cost and high performance). Proposed evaluation method evaluates laptop's adaptabilities of aforementioned life cycle options quantitatively and shows that upgrading can satisfy the intents of environmental load emission, production cost, and life cycle cost. In addition, the agendas of this study are emerged. Particularly, evaluation perspectives with respect to product disassemblability, reliability, and pleasurability should be added. Additionally, improving evaluation method that can evaluate multiple perspectives comprehensively is also this study's agenda.