ABSTRACT
The concept of product life cycle is well established in marketing, and in engineering, there has been a boon in models and proposals based on it. However, embracing the metaphor of the life cycle in nature, where sustainability and balance are in the middle, and using it to refer to product cycles, where the basis is far removed from those principles, is not simply naïve but also dangerous, leading to well-intentioned but narrow, short-sighted proposals about product design and development. With the aim of contributing to more appropriate sustainability proposals, this chapter introduces the sociotechnical product cycle model as a biological, analogy-free alternative that enables opportunities relating to human factors and ergonomics (HFE) to be identified for eco-productivity, eco-efficiency, socio-efficiency, eco-effectiveness, and socio-effectiveness in product design and development.
