The rapid increase in material use and goods produced in the global market is leading to harmful consequences for the environment and for human health. As consumption continues to increase, it is crucial to address the impacts associated with decisions about choices of materials used. Integrating safer material decisions during the product design and development process will lead to less harmful environmental and human health effects. Moreover, the sustainable performance of products depends on the choices of materials that go into those products.

This research seeks ways in which sustainable performance might become a more integral part of the materials choice process and aims to facilitate sustainable material choices during the product development process. Initially, the goal of the research was to create a tool that maps the trade-offs between material costs, performance and environmental impact, using 3D printing materials as a case study. Thirty-six 3D printing material filaments were examined for this research. For each filament, it’s description, base composition, mechanical properties, printing guidelines and hazards were collected. As empirical research progressed, however, it became clear that there are significant barriers to integrating sustainable material choices into the product development process that must be overcome in order to do so. This dissertation aims to clearly identify those barriers, including the significant complexity associated with gathering accurate data to feed a tool. 

The tool created here is presented as a set of specifications for how a tool should work, with representations of outputs that have been tested with the potential audience for the tool.  The dissertation thus addresses not only what a tool would have to do, but the changes needed in the system that surrounds such a tool to allow it to truly address material sustainability.

Developing innovative products and services benefits from collaboration within multidisciplinary design teams. Design teams gather and generate large quantities of data, including user research, information on competing products and applicable technologies, and new design ideas; however, teams often struggle to synthesize this diverse design information. Collaboration can break down if they cannot form a shared understanding of the design problem. This dissertation examines current design practices to construct theoretical models of the design process and to develop new tools to help design teams create, communicate, and collaborate. It explores how information tools are used to support collaborative design processes, and suggests forms for future tools. It presents a series of qualitative research studies, i.e., survey and interviews with professional and student designers as well as observations of face-to-face student design team meetings. The analysis of surveys and interviews with professional designers offer a descriptive characterization of how design teams use technology to share information with each other in practice. These studies also inform a new conceptual framework--the sharing spiral-- that describes how information is shared throughout individual and collaborative design tasks, across user research and conceptual design phases. With this new framework guiding qualitative analysis of observations of face-to-face student design team meetings, nine challenges to information sharing are identified. This dissertation proposes design guidelines for new design collaboration technology, based on these challenges. Finally, it applies these guidelines to a new system, Dazzle. Dazzle is an information sharing tool for face-to-face design teams that allows teammates to share, log, and annotate shared design resources. This dissertation offers a new understanding of information sharing in design practice, and has implications for improving design practice and the development of future design tools.