| Abstract |
People have recently become aware of the need to protect the environment. The integration of the circular economy concept and product design has become an essential strategic consideration, and the world is bound to give more attention to circular design. It aims to consider restorability and renewability in stages of the life cycle while doing design, such as the pathway of recycling, disassembling, reusing, and so forth. The purpose is to let waste become resources endlessly and create value continuously. Moreover, facing the demand for constantly changing products, the capability of innovation is also crucial. Hence, a product development process with the notion of circular design and innovative methods with the patent trend is incredibly important, but as we know so far there are few such approaches available, which motivates our study. To begin with, this study identifies five circular design criteria and forty elements to develop a framework for establishing a product design evaluation system for the waste electrical and electronic equipment products from the perspective of the product life cycle and operation procedure. The performance index of circular design degree (CDD) is created for the evaluation system using the Fuzzy Analytic Network Process method. Then, the product design can be evaluated to identify the criteria and elements with a lower CDD score for improvement. In addition, this study uses the TRIZ tool inventive principle from the contradiction matrix to find suitable patents, meanwhile, we use product attributes to find their evolution trends. Finally, after combining product evolution trends and patents, product innovative ideas are generated for suggestions to product designers. A small household electric appliance is used as a case study for illustrating the usefulness of the proposed methodology and guiding the product designers on how to improve and innovate their products with circular design consideration. |