January 13, 2023

158: Thinking Sustainability in Hardware Product Design

27 minutes

Dave Duncan is the Vice President Sustainability at PTC Corp, the company behind multiple product design software solutions including OnShape and CREO. He has spent over 20 years in the product design software world, and has his Bachelor of Engineering from Princeton University. Today Dave is going to share some valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on what it means to develop a sustainable product, what the 3 different types of product sustainability are, and how to use modern best practices in ensuring your product is most marketable by including sustainability as one of your key product development priorities.

Today you will hear us talk about:

Designing for sustainability

Manufacturing for sustainability

Servicing and Lifecycle management of the product

Design for sustainability early

The main impacts are around carbon emissions

Products can be designed for sustainability

What do you have to do to adhere to sustainability, and what can you do to improve sustainability beyond what the regulations are.

Don’t wait too late in the product design lifecycle to start building sustainability into the product design.

Software can help analyze the options.

Build in sustainability to your early design.

Even in B2B product sales, now there are metrics to promote the purchasing of sustainable products. It gives your product an edge.

This is an advantage as a startup

80% of a product’s carbon and waste footprint is determined at design time.

20% can be done in the factory to reduce that further.

Bottleneck analysis

Energy management

The circular economy / circular product

In design, simply put, think about how your product will end, and how it can be re-used, recycled, or re-configured.

Think about your commercial relationships with your customers regarding end of useful life.

Generative design in OnShape can actually remove materials through AI. This is called lightweighting.

With Arena, you can manage the bill of materials, and analyze

EPISODE LINKS:

Dave Duncan Links:

LinkedIn | Try OnShape for Free | Creo | PTC

The Product Startup Podcast Links:

https://www.ProductStartup.com/

PTC Links:

https://www.ptc.com/

OnShape | Creo

Mako Design Links:

https://www.makodesign.com/

Kevin Mako Links:

Instagram | LinkedIn | Quora | Facebook | Twitter

Partner: PTC’s best-in-class software solutions Onshape: The only cloud-native product development platform that delivers full-featured computer-aided design (CAD), integrated product data management (PDM) and enterprise analytics in a single system, and Creo: 3D CAD solution that provides designers with the most innovative tools to build better products faster, such as generative design, additive manufacturing, real-time simulation, IIoT, and augmented reality.

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories.