Applying TRIZ and Life Cycle Engineering to Eco-innovation Product Design: A Practice Case

Environmental concerns have become strategically important to product design and engineering education. This paper presents a practice case to illustrate how students apply TRIZ and life cycle engineering (LCE) to eco-innovation product design. An eco-innovation product design method that integrates TRIZ and LCE into a holistic methodology was proposed, which can be used to assist students in developing eco-innovative products based on informed procedures. Functional modeling and analysis are implemented through the technological relationship diagram of the target product. TRIZ methods are used for generating product ideas, which are then arranged and combined to produce a set of design concepts using morphological analysis. An eco-innovation ideality is also proposed to evaluate alternative concepts as well as to determine the optimal design concept. The practice case shows that the proposed method has the potential to help students generate radical design concepts for eco-innovation of products.