INTEGRATING ERGONOMIC DESIGN AND SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF HUMAN-CENTRED APPROACHES IN SUSTAINABLE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Sustainable product development has emerged as an important issue of concern to industries that seek to ensure that the environmental effects are minimized without compromising the product use and functionality. Despite the fact that the ergonomic design and sustainability assessment are widely acknowledged as the key elements of the contemporary product development, the studies that deal with the integration of the aforementioned aspects are still disjointed. This paper will provide a systematic literature review on the application of principles of ergonomic design and sustainability assessment techniques in product development study. The review is conducted based on the PRISMA protocol to provide a transparency and rigour of the methodology. The major academic databases, such as Scopus, Web of science, ScienceDirect and Google Scholar, were searched to identify relevant studies published between 2000 and 2025. The results show that the majority of studies consider ergonomics and sustainability as two different areas, and ergonomic studies have been based on usability and human performance. Conversely, sustainability studies focus on the assessment of environmental impact with the help of such tools as life cycle assessment. Nevertheless, there is increasing evidence on the significance of human-centred design to enhance sustainability performance through user behavior, product life and lifecycle performance. According to the review results, this paper suggests a synthesized conceptual framework, integrating inputs of user-centred design, ergonomic assessment techniques, and sustainability assessment measures in an iterative product development process to facilitate more holistic sustainable product innovation.