Triz Model Approach for Conceptualizing Household Furniture With a Disassembling Design

Introduction

Excessive material extraction is one of the main problems of climate change and biodiversity loss, since 1970 the use of non-metallic materials has quintuplicated. It is estimated that by 2060 global use of materials will duplicate to 190 billion tons. Therefore, a systemic reassessment of resource use is required (UN, 2019). Nowadays, developing alternatives that look for complex-problem solutions is a process that requires implementing assertive models in order to build ideas, mechanisms and procedures that promote fast answers and group participation from different specialists, general public and any other element that provides with the chosen final solution.

Between 80 and 90% of furniture costs are defined during the design, before being manufactured (Desai & Mital, 2003). This affectation also has an impact on its life cycle as each stage may determine controlled resource use, considering the application stages in order to close material cycles. Development of low environmental impact furniture is a historic and current need, designers must face challenges of concept, manufacture and useful life of their project, and in their professional life they conceptualize functional objects based on human needs. However, environmental affectation is not always given consideration as the current priority is to define requirements of design, which facilitates recovering the value of products and process planning that give place to an orderly, easy and efficient separation of multi-part systems and separated units so as to make them available for a long use in new products. Defined activities for the disassembling process before, during and after are determined by the design (Mok, Kim & Moon, 1997).

Nowadays, a Design teacher’s perception on aspects of structure, use, function and morphological analysis applied to objects is an everyday action and when evaluating the object’s requirements as quantitative and qualitative units, recycling, reusing or reutilization of designs are not planned. For its conceptualization, strategies have been defined in order to obtain better timing when disassembling, promoting tendencies toward reutilization and alignment with generic criteria of companies, as well as actions to facilitate the designer with the project’s global analysis process, considering the design’s multiple variables to be addressed. Results obtained strengthen a new cultural construction for consolidating a sustainable productive sector, the teaching-learning structure for industrial designers, mainstreaming of projects between universities and companies, decrease of excessive exploitation of natural resources and strengthening of criteria for developing a circular economy.

In order to conceptualize a design, specific strategies are presented in terms of type and space location of furniture, where application area, primary functions and priority interaction systems are defined. Building a user’s profile is established by thinking about the design. Besides, a strategic model is determined for material selection, applied ergonomics, load analysis and biomechanics study, anthropometric study, indicative factors, culture, context, aesthetics and energy saving for production processes. Finally, development of interaction matrixes and selection of proposals that are connected to the TRIZ model. Results obtained strengthen a new cultural construction for consolidating a sustainable productive sector, the teaching-learning structure for industrial designers, mainstreaming of projects between universities and companies, decrease of excessive exploitation of natural resources and strengthening of criteria for developing a circular economy.