Conference Agenda

Circular business models (CBMs) focus on cycling, extending, intensifying, and/or dematerialising material and energy loops to reduce resource inputs and waste and emission leakage. We aim to explore consumer behaviour in circular economy through a systematic literature review to determine barriers and motivators to implementing CBMs, analysing twenty-eight articles. We identified internal motivations, such as economic and environmental concerns; and external factors facilitating engagement with circularity, such as better awareness, and products with design for circularity.

Biobased composites - sustainable alternatives to fossil-based materials, could gain better acceptance if their perceptual handicaps could be overcome. This paper considers the role of tactility in contrast with visual stimuli, as well as the perceptual qualities influenced by tactility. The analysis revealed a significant impact of tactility in forming attributes such as naturality, roughness and strength. Attributes like beauty and complexity remain less affected by touch, and more visual-dominant. These findings may help designers in creating desirable products with sustainable materials.

The integration of sustainability into highly uncertain technology development is key to support manufacturing companies to reduce their environmental impacts. The use of future scenarios to support decision-making in early design for sustainability is promising, but there is a lack of systematic guidelines on how to build them. Through literature review and empirical research scenario-building guidelines were designed. The guidelines are step-by-step activities to be performed in workshops. Results suggest the guidelines were successful in building consistent, plausible, and useful scenarios.

Amidst environmental, regulatory, and societal pressures, integrating sustainability into Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is key, evolving into Sustainable PLM (sPLM). This paper uses a systematic literature review and text-mining (C-value method) to categorise sPLM research into clusters, assess their integration at organisational levels, and evaluate the level’s maturity. Findings highlight a gap in operational sPLM research. Future studies should bridge the gap between theory and industrial application, enhance sPLM operationalisation, and explore emerging technologies’ impact on sPLM.

In this article, we argue that the low-tech narrative redefined by a French low-tech movement in recent years can be considered as a legitimate research object for design research. Based on the French low-tech movement’s literature, we present the definitions of the low-tech concept as an approach driven by principles and highlight two theorical limitations of this type of definition. Based on a value-sensitive design approach, we present transdisciplinary research results through a value-driven low-tech model and discussed its limitations and possible use as a tool for engineers.