Environment: The First Thing to Look at in Conceptual Design

This paper aims to addresses three questions related to conceptual design: 1) Why is environment important? 2) What is environment? and 3) How to analyze environment? Unlike product-, function (affordance)-, or user-centered methodologies, it is argued that the known environment of a product to be designed must be the first thing to be looked at in a conceptual design. The environment can be categorized into three types: the natural, the built and the human. A complete set of environment for a design is implied in the lifecycle of a product to be designed, which can be further defined by lifecycle activities in terms of time. The analysis of environment consists of three activities: 1) determine decision directions by asking design questions based on a design problem statement; 2) clarify the design problem statement by answering questions following the decision direction; and 3) formulate an environment system from a design problem statement. The process is driven by asking the right questions by analyzing the ROM diagram of the design problem statement. The answers to the questions follow the lifecycle analysis of the product and its environment components. This paper completes a detailed procedure for Environment Analysis, which is the one of the three activities in Environment-Based Design (EBD).

The Emperor’s New Clothes or an Enduring IT Fashion? Analyzing the Lifecycle of Industry 4.0 through the Lens of Management Fashion Theory

This paper examines the recent hype around Industry 4.0 through the lens of management fashion theory to answer the question of how Industry 4.0 has emerged as a management fashion and to what extent it has diffused in organizational practice. Therefore, we conducted a comprehensive discourse lifecycle analysis based on 3920 academic and practical publications comprising a rhetoric and content analysis along with a diffusion lifecycle analysis involving selected diffusion indicators. The findings indicate that Industry 4.0 constitutes an enduring management fashion that has recently reached its peak, with the first signs for an upcoming downswing. The discourse around Industry 4.0 illustrates the concept as a panacea for business problems such as a lack of sustainability and intense global competition; however, the diffusion lifecycle analysis indicates hesitation among companies to adopt Industry 4.0 due to the ambiguity in the conceptual interpretation. The findings enable a more holistic understanding of the recent developments around Industry 4.0 and help to identify actions for the involved political, practical and academic actors. To actively shape the Industry 4.0 fashion development path, more institutional work is needed to help Industry 4.0 fashion users with their adoption engagements and hence achieve “professionalization” at an organizational level.

A Lifecycle Analysis of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards in Japan

This study estimated the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) and CAFE targets of Japan’s domestic automobile manufacturers and evaluated whether manufactures have achieved these estimated CAFE targets. Furthermore, an analysis framework was proposed for estimating what impact the introduction of the CAFE standards in Japan will have on motor vehicle-derived lifecycle CO2 emissions. As a result, the following was found: (1) Automobile manufacturers can maximize their sales under the constraints of the CAFE standards, but vehicle sales plans based on sales maximization will lower their CAFE standard scores. (2) Economically optimal automobile manufacturer behavior—striving to achieve CAFE standards while maximizing sales—will increase the manufacturers’ overall carbon footprint and actually worsen the environment.