Success Factor Sustainability and the Need for Action in Design

Design is an important factor of success in todays markets and the overall product-experience is an influential differentiator for products. Increasingly, sustainability turns out to be a another key factor for the success of products. The present study poses the questions that address which success factors mostly influence the sustainability of products and which changes in the field of product design must be made in order to foster these success factors by design. The primary aim of this study was to provide indications of the truly important factors of success that are capable of being influenced by design. Therefore, semi-structured interviews were conducted to examine the experts’ views of sustainable development in design. The results confirm that designers are usually neither educated or professionally trained to undertake the areas encompassing the success factors, nor do they have a significant influence on them.