Fashion and Textile: Sustainable Product Development Design - Literature review Example

Name: Number: Unit: Course Supervisor: Submission Date Fashion and textile: Sustainable product development design Sustainable products refer to those products which offer economic, social and environmental benefit. Such products protect the environment and general public health during their life cycle. That is from raw material to final disposal (Howarth & Hadfield, 2005). Belz, (2009) adds that, sustainable product is made up of six characteristics which are: i. Competing offers: in some cases sustainable products are likely to lag behind in regards to competing offers. To safeguard competition in the targeted market, competing offers play the role of benchmarking in reference to ecological and social performances. ii. Continuous improvement: there is need to keep on improving the environmental and social variation of a sustainable product due to evolution in societal expectation, technologies and knowledge. iii. Significant improvement: sustainable product should be able to provide socio-ecological product performance through providing measurable improvement and deal with problems associated with socio-ecology. iv. Life-cycle orientation: sustainable product should be environmental friendly in that the sustainable product should be valid and reliable from extraction to disposal stage. v. Dual focus: sustainable product unlike environmental products should focus on both social and ecological significance. vi. Customer satisfaction: to ensure market sustainability a sustainable product should focus on the customer needs for long-term market. The main objective of coming with a sustainable design product is to ensure possible negative impacts are completely ruled out through sensitive and skillful design. A sustainable design should have totally renewable resources, allow people to connect with natural environment and if in any form impact the environment limitedly (McLennan, 2004). This task will look at the sustainability development of a textile and fashion design product in reference to development process design and relate it to different models on sustainability. The product of choice is white singlet cotton Australian brand top 100% viscose. Sustainability Process of product development Process is defined as sequential steps that are followed to transform a given set of input to anticipated set of outputs. Product development process on the other hand is the activities that a particular endeavor adapts to commercialize, conceive and design a product. Most of these activities rather than being physical are organizational and intellectual. In this task the textile and fashion sustainable product will be produced following Ulrich-Eppinger development process as shown in diagram 1 below. Justification of Ulrich-Eppinger development process to sustainability i. Offers a room for improvement. The Ulrich-Eppinger development process is carefully documented and review can be done to ensure that it brings forth better result now and again. ii. Management flexibility: using the Ulrich-Eppinger development process managers are able to do benchmarking of ongoing development efforts. Therefore the manager can actually compare the results with the development procedures and find out areas that are problematic. iii. Planning is key to any development process. In Ulrich-Eppinger development process, each planning stage has clearly stated the required steps and required time specification. This fact offers room to planners to estimate the required time to bring forth the required product. iv. Coordination: lack of proper coordination among team players is a key cause of product in-sustainability. The Ulrich-Eppinger development process clearly stipulates out the different stages that a product should follow from planning to conceptualization. To this, it is easy to find out the required team players and technology of importance to ensure smooth coordination during product development process. v. Quality assurance: every product released in the market looks for large market. However, different products and services are likely to have a one sale or rejects in turn losing their market in future. Quality assurance is vital in any product sustainability development. QA ensures that there is systematic monitoring of procedures during product development or service. This way an end product meets quality standards by making sure there are no defects in the end product (Feldman, 2005). In addition, QA ensures customer satisfaction leading to market sustainability. This task will follow the Ulrich-Eppinger development process QA due to its reliability and effectiveness over the years of application (Ulrich & Eppinger, 2000). Virtual PD software tool Today industrialization, urbanization is on move. Globalization has affected the world in so many ways. It has come at a point where managers, customers, producers, sellers and planners do their jobs at the comfort of their houses, cafeteria or in vehicles. Therefore, timely delivery of information is very important in any sustainable product development process (Egbogah, 2012). Virtual PD software tool will be of necessity in this process to ensure immediate data editing, up-dating of detail of the product to keep in the market pace and efficient and effective review of the product design in time. Such information of significance will be the size required, quantity, CAD art design, color and texture. This procedural of passing information is environmental friendly as it is emphasized by cradle-to-cradle model. Information provided through this practice is also available for future review without further cost on invention. Sustainability quantification of the product Cradle-to-cradle design According to (McDonough & Braungart, 2002) C2C supports that, industry should aim at ecosystem protection and enrichment and nature’s biological metabolism. As the industry achieves this objective they should also maintain technical and organic nutrients circulation, high-quality-usable productive technical metabolism and safe. In other words cradle-to-cradle is a holistic social, industrial and economic framework that aims to bring forth essentially waste free and efficient systems. The C2C model is widely applied in both the manufacturing and industrial design and can be flexed to fit any form of sustainable development design. Materials used either in commercial or industrial processes in C2C model are categorized as biological or technical nutrients. Biological nutrients refer to organic materials that are decomposable and can be disposed to the environment to provide manure, food for small living animals. Technical nutrients refer to synthetic materials that cannot harm the environment in any way and are non-toxic. Technical nutrients are reusable maintaining the same product holding the same quality. Therefore, technical nutrients instead of down-cycling can be used again and again. This model was considered in choosing the product as cotton is an organic materials and can be used as manure additional factors supported the use of this model are: Health On daily basis human being either indirectly or directly consumes many harmful chemical and other materials. These toxic products are also exposed to animals and plants threatening their life. It is the C2C supports that dangerous technical nutrients such as dangerous chemicals, heavy metals and mutagenic materials are removed from the current life cycle. This will only be achievable through ensuring that detrimental materials and chemical human, animals and plant life comes into contact is health supportive. All technical nutrients harmful arising from a fabric industry can be eliminated fewer base chemical dyes a fact that this sustainable product development looks forward to embrace. Economics Financial cost reduction of the system is the C2C model focus in addition to other factors. Products designed with C2C model focuses on eliminating waste disposal. In addition, following this model to process a product manufacturers gain low manufacturing cost leading to low market price in comparison to alternative designs in the market. C2C model emphasizes on the need to ensure a consumer gets what he asks for absolutely without other ingredients unknowingly accompanied such as toxic substances. In addition, the production of obsolete materials should be looked into to ensure a product contains as much of raw material as possible. To achieve this objective the product of choice in this study will embrace the NIKE environmental design tool Environmental design tool NIKE environmental design tool (NIKE, 2004) is a matrix tool that guides sustainable team designers to bring forth sustainable product. It uses material sustainability index (MSI) and the material assessment tool (MAT). The environmental design tool MAT provides information that is fundamental to the product design team to relate the material in production in relation to its sustainability. The tool is a form of inquiry guide that lets the designer realize and look into issues that are vital in ensuring sustainability of product during the design process. The MAT assesses the material environmental impact as well as supplier processes impact. Upon assessment, the MAT gives scores. The MSI score is usually 60% and the design waste production is 40%. Material sustainability is both a bottom-up and top-down affair in an organization. It is not possible to have pure product designers in sustainable designing processes. This indicates that, not all people supports sustainability and therefore, the push act is inevitable in a sustainable product development. Using composite MSI score the sustainable product development did look at the full lifecycle of the product see diagram 2. In addition, it did put into consideration environmental indicators such as recycled fibers for other use or other products, water utilization and green chemistry maintenance as well as reliable suppliers and better materials. Green chemistry maintenance was emphasized to reduce the amount of toxins produced to very low levels if any. This way the product development will not be life threatening. Despite organic cotton having a lower score 43 compared to lyocel 55 score and polyester 65 the marketability of cotton brand is high in Australia. The product looks into key factors that negatively affect the environment see red boxes. To counteract this, the product is of renewable resources and can be recycled. Worn out and un-required end product by users can be purchased at lower prices for renewal and recycling. Gases emissions are considered to be of very minimal quantity such that they limitedly impact the environment. Packaging materials will be considered to ensure they are of organic basis. Nevertheless, this does not mean the product is without negative forces such as non-human-energy consumption during the development process. Water requirement is of high demand from both the farm and product development process. For example in late 1990’s the fourth largest lake in the world; Aral Sea dried due to diversion of its waters to cotton plantation (MSC-164). Recycling of water is vital to minimize the loss. All effluents will be treated to get rid of toxic and other dangerous products before releasing to the environment as indicated in diagram 3. Diagram 2: Typical Product Lifecycle: sources: Product-Development-MC164-Week5 Diagram 3: LCA cycle diagram of a natural cycle sources: Product-Development-MC164-Week5 Virtual PD software tool impact In sustainable development, the focus is on technologies that create efficient transitions and reduce development iterations during manufacturing. Organic products have been given preference in sustainability. The other key factor is sustainable product development process in life-cycle. With this in mind, virtual product development has been of importance to the manufactures. Sustainable product development has three key components: 3D product simulation, coloration and printing digital methods adaption and electronic design and fit intent communication. Due to these facts, any manufacturing industry will look into embracing VPD software tool. This is because the software allows multiple workers at a given time. In addition, quality defects are actually reduced to a greater level avoiding loses and wastage of materials and other resources. Different samples of material in focus can be provided in 3D virtually and comments on improvement and other details reached by the designers before having the actual garment. Using VPD, turnaround of information is extremely, high, fast, timely and cost effective. Sublitech a part of VPD provide digital photographic printing for custom needs, promotional and fashion. The software, Automated Nesting is important as it reduces labor costs; ensure product quality and fast processing of cost information. This software maximizes utilization of material by capturing many nesting options and choosing the most efficient marker. Fashion studio gives another important opportunity for all intended needs on fashion and textile design. This not only decreases print design and textile cost, but also allows idea communication and product development streamlining. Three dimensional transformations are necessitated using VsticherTM. Using these software users can compress product time significantly and lower sample costs requirements. Three dimensional garment simulation has been possible a fact which allows the designers to have a blue print of the expected product. Situation where changes of measurement are required, this can be efficiently and effectively using Optitex 3D virtual model. (Information obtained from VPD lecture notes 11/09/2013.) In conclusion, careful sustainable design and adaptation of the best sustainable developmental processes is a key factor in sustainable product development design. References Belz F.M. (2009). Sustainability Marketing. A Global Perspective. Wiley: United Kingdom Egbogah E.O. (2012) Role of Technology in National Development; Emerald energy resources Feldman S. (2005). Quality assurance: much more than testing. Queue 3:1 Hadfield M. & Howarth, G. (2002). Sustainable development training and educational challenges for business and universities. In international conference; engineering education in sustainable design. Delft, the Netherlands; 174-82 McDonough W. & Braungart M. (2002) Cradle to Cradle: Remarking the Way We Make Things, North Point press McLennan J.F. (2004). The Philosophy Of Sustainable Design. Bainbridge; US NIKE (August, 2004) www.nike.com/nikebiz-responsibilities-factories and workers Product-Development-MC164-Week3: Sustainable Product Design and Development for Fashion and Textiles Product-Development-MC164-Week5: Sustainable Product Design and Development for Fashion and Textiles Ulrich K.T. & Eppinger S.D. (2000). Product Design and Development, McGraw-Hill, New York Virtual-Product-Development Tutorial 1 11/09/2013 Read More