What is D-TechnoSS ?
Context and presentation
Until now, sustainability research has focused primarily, at the macro level, on institutional actors and systemic change efforts and at the micro level, researchers has studied consumer choice of product and post-use disposal. The D-TechnoSS project will try to complete the gap between the design of products and the acceptance by consumers in order to propose sustainable products into ecological constraints linked to planetary limits. This project will propose a new method of designing products following the consumers’ needs and level of acceptance, and inside ecological constraints linked to planetary limits. Then one of the main deliverable is to provide a DfS methodology that enables to integrate, firstly, the knowledge of consumer needs and acceptance and, secondly, the ecological impacts to remain into planetary limits, adopting a multi level approach to asses rebound effects of the designed product.
Objectives and research hypoteses
The project aims at rethinking technology in order to answer sustainable development challenges in a strong sustainability approach, that is to say considering a limited environment impacting the way to design, product, consume and throw products.The final technological result of the project is then a new engineering methodology that takes part in new knowledge and practice in the Engineering Science domain, integrating new Human Science knowledge.
The project is based on the following assumptions :
- The production model clashes with planetary boundaries (in terms of resources, biodiversity, climate).
- The technologic dependency of people in the economic model prevents from autonomy of evolution without financial means defined by private actors mainly.
- Environmental constraints (social, ecological, financial) cannot be compensated by any technology yet by an evolution of the human’s way of life.
