Sustainability by design: the impact of product architecture decisions on the sustainability of products – a practitioner qualitative assessment Grothe, Robin Bita, Isaac Mpidi Hovemann, Aschot Dumitrescu, Roman <jats:title>ABSTRACT:</jats:title> <jats:p>Sustainability is a central challenge in engineering. Early architectural design decisions strongly influence a product’s ecological footprint and long-term sustainability potential. Addressing these aspects in the concept phase is therefore essential. This paper analyses how architecture decisions - such as modularity, standardisation, redundancy, and updateability - affect ecological sustainability. The qualitative assessment helps practitioners to anticipate environmental impacts and foster sustainability awareness in product architecture development.</jats:p> Cambridge University Press (CUP) 2026 info:eu-repo/semantics/article doc-type:article text http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501 https://ris.uni-paderborn.de/record/67368 Grothe R, Bita IM, Hovemann A, Dumitrescu R. Sustainability by design: the impact of product architecture decisions on the sustainability of products – a practitioner qualitative assessment. <i>Proceedings of the Design Society</i>. 2026;6:1291-1300. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2026.10487">10.1017/pds.2026.10487</a> eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1017/pds.2026.10487 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/issn/2732-527X info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess