Environmental impacts from products and services are more serious than ever before, and environmental factors of a product are becoming a part of product quality. And it is said that future environmental progress depends on designers' ability to support the environmental requirements of products. For this reason, there is a strong need for designers to design 'Green products'.
The purpose of this thesis is to investigate concrete Green Design concepts, and develop design processes for finding better solutions of Green products. The goal of Green Design process is to get design concept out of ambiguity and to set to design Green products systematically.
Firstly, theories and principles about Green Design were studied to find concrete concepts. Then this thesis suggests eleven Green Design concepts based on 3Rs, which are 'Reuse', 'Recycle', and 'Reduce'. Among These concepts, "Parts Reduction" was selected for the major subject for the purpose of better-disassembly, and developed as a systematic process model based on VRP(Variety Reduction Program) and VE(Value Engineering) in detail. This design process model consists of five steps: from subject, data collection, function and volume analysis, alternatives to assessment. The process model takes into considerations materials, functions, fastening methods and tools, volume, and number of parts. Finally, a hair drier was experimented with the process model. This case study suggested reducing some parts and fastenings of the hair drier as a result. The result of experiment shows that reducing some parts of a product can reduce some fastenings and make products be able to disassembled more easily. Then findings are summarized and further studies are prospected.
