Design Matrix as starting point to assess product sustainability

Product development is a time-consuming activity trying to answer, at best, the demanding customer needs. In general, the design of an industrial product needs several competencies that work conjointly, in the respect of many constraints that urge from the firm' departments. Last but not least sustainability is gaining a relevant role, since the recent past, and absolutely not deferred for the destiny of humankind on earth in the future. Design Matrix is the first array that designers should compose in order to verify the feasibility of product architecture since it put in relation functional requirements and design parameters. Clearly, designers are really far from the embodiment of valid proposals, at this moment. It is necessary to map this information to other data structures that allow them to follow the evolving architectural work, in which physical components or effective parts perform the actions that satisfy functional requirements. Design Structure Matrix (DSM) is a promising data structure that shows the relationship among all subsystems that compose the developing product. This structure can be arranged also to collect all the environmental parameters or indicators in order to have a rough sustainability assessment since the early design phases. The paper will discuss such kind of relation and apply it to a case study in order to clarify it.