Print Email Facebook Twitter Sustainability in the front-end of innovation at design agencies Title Sustainability in the front-end of innovation at design agencies Author Storaker, A. Wever, R. Dewulf, K. Blankenburg, D. Faculty Industrial Design Engineering Department Design Engineering Date 2013-12-04 Abstract In the two last decades a considerable amount of research has been conducted on the Front End of Innovation. This is the stage of the product development process where the design brief is formulated. This phase is argued to be crucial to the success of the final product. While the Front End of Innovation in general has been a hot research topic, little research has been conducted on its relationship to design for sustainability. Indeed, within Design-for-Sustainability literature a strong focus can be observed on the phase after the formulation of the design brief. Many companies hire external design agencies for their product innovation. In such collaborations, goals and targets for the design project need to be clarified in the early stages of the project, including sustainability targets. The role of design agencies in design for sustainability is also under-researched. This paper discusses the potential of sustainability as a value-adding activity for design agencies. It explores how design agencies deal with sustainability issues in the Front End of Innovation. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with five major Dutch design agencies. Findings show that a distinction can be made between incorporation of sustainability as a consequence of a client request (i.e. client-driven sustainability) and when sustainability is incorporated into the project by the agency (i.e. agency-driven sustainability). Also, agencies appear to deal with sustainability on a decomposed level. This study has initiated an array of follow-up studies, which are sketched in the further research section. Subject design bureaudesign consultancyfuzzy front endgoal findingtarget setting To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:be92767f-5e50-4f8e-9d6b-0576a60e44a0 Source EcoDesign 2013: 8th International Symposium on Environmentally Conscious Design and Inverse Manufacturing, Jeju Island, South Korea, 4-8 December 2013 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type conference paper Rights (c) 2013 Storaker, A.Wever, R.Dewulf, K.Blankenburg, D. Files PDF O-D-11_Storaker.pdf 97.14 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:be92767f-5e50-4f8e-9d6b-0576a60e44a0/datastream/OBJ/view