The missing pillar: exploring social sustainability in product development

Abstract: Industries are increasingly pressed to consider sustainability aspects when making strategic decisions regarding their products and manufacturing processes. It is well recognized that decisions made during early phases of product development determine much of the entire life cycle behavior of the product. Despite the growing awareness of sustainability issues and importance of considering sustainability aspects in product development, the methodological support for doing so is still immature. The immaturity is particularly pronounced regarding the social dimension (or pillar) of sustainability.The overall aim of this thesis was to contribute to sustainable product development by studying how the social dimension of sustainability could be further developed and by exploring how a strategic perspective could be included to provide better support for decision-making and innovation for social sustainability. These objectives were pursued in two distinct ways.Firstly, a critical review of the literature focused on the integration of social aspects in lifecycle assessment methods, namely Social LCA, was conducted. The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development was used to analyze and evaluate the potential contribution of these current efforts in relation to sustainable product development and sustainability in general. Secondly, a principled definition of social sustainability was used in the prototyping of two approaches for including social sustainability concerns in product development. The first approach was designed to provide decision-making support when selecting between two product concepts. The second one was built on a previous approach to developing sustainability criteria and aimed at expanding the social sustainability criteria and related sustainability compliance index to be used to support design decisions in product development.In the review of Social LCA methods several challenges were identified. From a decision support perspective, they were found lacking robustness: results from the assessment, usually performed by scientists to evaluate a scientific question, may be too complex to interpret from a business standpoint; the impact perspective may be too narrow, missing other aspects of social sustainability; and generally they lacked a strategic business perspective. The use of a strategic sustainable development perspective in the developed approaches suggest that some of these challenges can be tackled. The use of backcasting from social sustainability principles can: help organize and make sense of the general field of social sustainability, highlighting where overlaps between objectives exist; provide the long-term perspective needed for sustainability; allow for product developers to gain awareness of potential social impacts of  a product’s life cycle phases within knowledge, time and resource constraints; help build a roadmap in order to reduce a product’s contribution to social unsustainability.Future research should focus on developing further tactical design guidelines that provide support to the longterm social sustainability criteria in order to reveal the connection between decisions taken at product development level with a product’s sustainability profile.