Sustainable Design
Sustainability is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a business imperative. In the next decade, every single product made will need to be considered for its environmental footprint, and ways to improve it. Whether reducing carbon footprint, implementing circular material flows, or shifting toward more sustainable business models, Synapse can help. We have created a data-based approach to quickly assess the footprint of a product or service, backed with a portfolio of design solutions for reducing the impact. In most cases, we can reduce the carbon footprint of a product by 20% to 50% without impacting user experience or cost.
Sustainable Product Development and Design Services
Sustainable product development
Does reducing the carbon footprint of your products without impacting the function or cost sound like a dream? It can be reality. During the product development process, we implement a number of sustainable design principles, including design-concurrent life cycle assessment (LCA), circularity, and hot-spot analysis in order to reduce the environmental impact of products and services.
Sustainable business transformation
Business model shifts can harness the greatest sustainability and circularity opportunities, often much more than product-specific focus. Synapse understands how hardware can be designed to facilitate business model changes and can not only provide the roadmap for business transformation but also equip a client team to execute on it.
Sustainability strategy workshops
In order to help clients synthesize, communicate, and build sustainability strategy, we offer strategic and product-specific workshops in two areas: sustainability strategy, where we will prioritize sustainability issues, develop metrics and goals, and translate these into impacts on the product development process; and product-level sustainability strategy, where we leverage LCA before the workshop to identify hotspots for the product design and use whole system mapping to generate concepts to improve sustainability impacts.
“Synapse Product Development gave us the opportunity to embrace sustainability and was pivotal in getting our initiative off the ground.”
— Drew Carlson, Senior Industrial Designer
Eco-audit and life
cycle assessment
LCA considers the sustainability footprint of everything in the product life-cycle, from raw materials extraction to recycling or disposal. An LCA can be used to quantify a product’s impact across several areas of interest — anything from carbon footprint to land use to human health. Results are communicated by highlighting the hot-spots, the focus areas where system changes can have the highest positive impact. Quantifying the impact achieved through implementing changes to a product’s design or life cycle provides data for effective decision making.
Green manufacturing
and supply chain
Identifying the best options for sustainable realization and ensuring that a sustainably designed product is manufactured in the most sustainable way is a critical implementation step — but it’s also one that many companies struggle with. Our team is focused on knowing the most sustainable supply chain and manufacturing options as well as the latest methods on circularity, reclamation, and fulfillment.
Podcast
