2025/08/27 by Zumach, Katharina, Wehrend, Sven, Krause, Dieter
Business, Management and Accounting · Engineering · #Design Education and Practice #Environmental Sustainability in Business #Sustainable Supply Chain Management #Technology::600: Technology #challenges #design practice #design process #product development #sustainability
paper · doi:10.15480/882.16107
openalex publication_date 2025/08/27 · openalex created_date 2025/11/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
Due to climate change, sustainability has become a crucial topic in product development, while addressing it is associated with many challenges. Based on a literature review, those challenges are collected and clustered into nine categories and sub-categories defined for this purpose. Additionally, a research project is analysed. The exhibited challenges such as data availability versus influenceability, a lack of unified sustainability criteria, and decision-making trade-offs underscore the need for refined methodologies and collaboration in sustainability-oriented design. The differently sourced challenges are compared and the new challenges arising from the research project are sorted into the categories. Finally, possible reasons are discussed for why within the project only challenges from four out of nine categories are encountered.