Adam Mallalieu, Produktutveckling

The manufacturing industry needs a rapid shift in how products are designed and produced to better contribute to sustainable production and consumption. This, together with emerging technologies, upcoming legislation, and changing market trends, drives a sustainability transition in manufacturing companies, and design has been identified as a crucial enabler of this transition. Therefore, design researchers have proposed several design methods to support adequate integration of sustainability in their design processes.

Despite their evidenced benefits, the industrial adoption of such design methods remains underutilized, an issue that has persisted and been continuously raised for more than 20 years in the 'design domain'. This is a multifaceted issue, and previous research has identified several barriers and enablers to adoption, ranging from recommendations to modify, simplify, or 'improve' these design methods, to promoting the use of qualitative data. Although many of these enablers have proven successful, the industrial adoption of design methods remains a contemporary issue. At the same time, change has been thoroughly treated in the 'management domain', and there is an underutilized body of knowledge that can be used to better understand why this issue persists and to strengthen practical contributions, thus contributing to the design community. This research, therefore, adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to study industrial adoption, employing several methods to collect and analyze qualitative empirical data together with actors in the Swedish manufacturing industry, including action research, case studies, participant observation, Glaserian grounded theory, questionnaires, and interviews.

There are four main contributions of this research: (i) A descriptive framework that captures 53 interdisciplinary barriers and enablers to the industrial adoption of design methods. The framework incorporates process and methodological, organizational, and human-behavioral perspectives, capturing several factors typically scattered across research domains; (ii) Two new concepts are proposed, the dualism of design methods and the situational design problem. These, in turn, clarify the role of design methods in a sustainability transition and also clarify the key barriers to industrial adoption; (iii) A needs-driven and collaboration-based adoption approach that guides industrial adoption by supporting researchers and practitioners to adapt design methods; (iv) An interactive method to guide the assessment of a collaborative ecosystem's ability to share and manage sustainability information and data.