Enabling green design with TRIZ

Companies are facing increasing pressure to produce more environmentally friendly products and the need to innovate and solve problems quickly and consistently has never been more paramount to a company´s ability to succeed. The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) offers users a scientific problem solving approach, which eliminates the instinctive behavior of guessing and randomly generating ideas to solve a problem. By systematically identifying the fundamental contradictions in the problem, users will be pointed in a general direction in order to find a solution. To fine-tune this design method for green product design, a new problem solving model was developed, and with the help of the Trisolver software, a case study on increasing the efficiency of vehicles in an urban driving environment was carried out. TRIZ enables designers to find a solution to the problem, and use an application for improving hybrid vehicles. It was also found that the bridging nature of TRIZ allowed it to be used with many other existing design methods, but it is also noted that the choice of which of these methods to utilize in the design process depended upon many factors, such as the users´ preferences and the topic of interest. Recommendations for further works were also proposed, and the conclusion was made based on the challenges encountered during the case study that TRIZ is indeed a powerful tool for green engineering product design.