Conceptual modeling method for living-sphere approach

Ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns is one of the United Nation’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) for 2030. To achieve this, it is necessary for product development to consider not only reducing the environmental burden from a product life cycle but also satisfying human needs. The authors have proposed locally-oriented sustainable product design, which aims to improve the sufficiency of human needs and reduce the environmental impact by reflecting the regionally specific conditions in product development. For this purpose, a systematic approach for connecting fundamental human needs and the product development process, called the living-sphere approach, has been proposed. This approach uses a framework of fundamental human needs proposed by Max-Neef. The point of this approach is that product structures are connected to satisfiers. This study aims to propose a modeling method from a product to satisfiers in a living-sphere. In this study, we focus on reverse engineering and laddering method. By combining these bottom-up methods, we propose a modeling method from product structures to satisfiers. In a case study, we selected Japan as a target region and a rice cooker as an example. The result shows a possibility of this method for an evaluation of sufficiency, on the other hand, also shows the necessity of improvement of extracting regional requirements.