Conflicts between eco-design and usability of refrigerators

In the field of the household refrigerators, design engineers and researchers improve energy efficiency of the components of the products. However, the improvement of refrigerators´ energy efficiency will reach the limit if the shapes of the refrigerators are fixed. The layout of each cabinet is decided based on the usability and has not changed for many years. There are some problems in the current type of refrigerator from the view point of thermal engineering, but changing the shape of refrigerators may cause the users inconvenience. This is a conflict between eco-design and usability of refrigerators. The energy efficiency and usability of the alternative types of refrigerators was studied and the conflict between eco-design and usability of each type of refrigerators was pointed out in this paper.