TRIZ-Based Guidelines for Eco-Improvement

This paper proposes a set of Eco-guidelines for supporting designers in developing new greener products and processes. The first requirement that a guideline should have is to be sufficiently general to cover every kind of problem and at the same time sufficiently specific to bring the user closer to the solution without requiring too much personal inspiration. This balance was searched by adopting one of the most known systematic innovation techniques: TRIZ (Russian acronym of Theory of Inventive Problem Solving). In the literature, there are many examples of integrations between Eco-guidelines and problem-solving methods, but the solutions that are suggested, however effective, are not necessarily eco-friendly. To overcome this problem, the authors propose a rigorous ontology indicating how to apply a specific problem-solving strategy onto a specific part of the problem, trying to make the user aware of the environmental consequences of his design changes. The result of this work is a set of 59 guidelines. The article explains the birth of each guideline, the way in which they were adapted with respect to the known technique, and the motivation for which they should generate greener solutions, in light of the results of an experiment involving engineering students in real industrial cases.