Using social sustainability principles to analyse activities of the extraction lifecycle phase: Learnings from designing support for concept selection (original) (raw)
Journal of Cleaner Production
Analysing product concepts with respect to social sustainability is a contemporary challenge for which there is little support available for product developers. Our aim was to build on previous work to support product developers in a case company with this challenge. Previously a definition of social sustainability was developed from science on how the social system functions. We designed a first prototype of support for product developers to use this previously developed definition when analysing the extraction lifecycle activities associated with their product concepts. The prototype instructs users to model the location of the extraction activities and then use existing databases and indicators to analyse the social sustainability performance of each location. The databases and indicators were selected according to their relevance to scientific principles for social sustainability. We then performed initial evaluation of the support, through which we learnt that the approach may make it possible for product developers to analyse extraction activities, but the level of accuracy of analysis that is possible is not good enough for comparing the concepts in the case study decision. We discuss the implications of these challenges and suggest that it may be better to redesign our approach in order to provide learningful support for product developers or support for other decisionmaking in the company.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.