Since the emergence of early approaches to design for the environment, such as green design and ecodesign, several tools have been developed to support the design process in integrating environmental, social, and, more recently, sustainability and circularity considerations.

These design for sustainability (DfS) tools present a big potential to promote and ease the integration of sustainability criteria in the product development process, but several studies indicate that their use by designers is still infrequent and, when used, they are mainly applied in a non-systematic way.

This research aims to develop a clear and comprehensive definition of what constitutes a DfS tool from a designer perspective, to establish criteria for classifying, and to organize them in a way that facilitates their identification, selection, and use by designers and other product development team members in accordance with the specific needs, objectives, and characteristics of each project.

The project counts with David Camocho and Pedro Gonçalves as external team members.