Designing with residual materials

Designing with residual materials

Walhout, W.
Wever, R.
Blom, E.
Addink-Dölle, L.
Tempelman, E.

Industrial Design Engineering

Design Engineering

2013-12-04

Many entrepreneurial businesses have attempted to create value based on the residual material streams of third parties. Based on ‘waste’ materials they designed products, around which they built their company. Such activities have the potential to yield sustainable products. Many of such companies remain in the more artistic domain, with relatively labor-intensive products, and small batch sizes. Moving beyond such small-scale activities would likely require a standardized innovation process. The design process for such residual material stream-based products, however, is somewhat different than regular mainstream industrial design engineering methodology. In this paper, a case study is presented based on one such company, with a portfolio of over 20 products, ranging from home & furnishing to kitchen & food services and ranging from office & work to event products. Based on historical projects, success factors for successful design with residual materials are determined. Results show, first of all, that particular attention needs to be paid to the consumer & market side of potential new projects. Second, products aren’t automatically more sustainable, hence attention needs to be paid to ensure that resulting products are sustainable. Third, sourcing of residual material streams is of the utmost importance. Finally, manufacturing with residual materials provides an additional challenge. The resulting design approach is subsequently tested in a real-life project for an external client, substantiating the findings of the analysis of historical projects.

product development
residual material streams
waste
entrepreneurship

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:60a124f3-f891-4981-8378-28577a8ce5d8

EcoDesign 2013: 8th International Symposium on Environmentally Conscious Design and Inverse Manufacturing, Jeju Island, South Korea, 4-8 December 2013

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2013 Walhout, W.
Wever, R.
Blom, E.
Addink-Dölle, L.
Tempelman, E.