Systemic Design for the innovation of home appliances The meaningfulness of data in designing sustainable systems

This work addressed the domestic environment considering this context as a complex system characterised by significant impacts in terms of resource consumption. Within the theoretical framework of Systemic Design (SD), this thesis focused on home appliances, in order to understand how to reduce the impact directly attributable to them, while optimising and simplifying daily tasks for the user. A design methodology towards environmental sustainability has been structured, by focusing on the use of data for design purposes and on creating value for the user through meaningful products. It considers the user, the product and the environment as central topics, by giving them the same relevance and the literature review is structured accordingly, investigating needs and requirements, ethical issues, but also current products and future scenarios. During my experience at TU Delft, I spent six months in the Department of Internet of Things at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. Together with computer scientists, we developed a prototype to collect some missing data, establishing the importance of grounding the decision-making on reliable information. IoT and data gathering open a variety of possibilities in monitoring, accessing more precise knowledge of products and households useful for design purposes, up to understand how to fill the gap perceived by the user between needs and solutions. It considered the potential benefits of using IoT indicators to collect missing information about both the product, its use and its operating environment to address critical aspects in the design stage, thus extending products’ lifetime. This thesis highlighted the importance of building multidisciplinary design teams to investigate different classes of requirements, and the need for flexible tools to cope with complex and evolving requirements, the co-evolution of problem and solutions and investigating open-ended questions. This approach leaves room for addressing every step of the traditional life-cycle in a more circular way, shifting the focus from the life-cycle centrality of the previous century to a more complex vision about the product.