Guidelines for Designing Green Products Considering Customers’ Cultural Preferences

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper proposes some very interesting topics and “food for thought”. Indeed, the consumer value perception and the cultural value are factors of growing interest in sustainable design because adoption and therefore the market success of eco-designed products are critical goals. However, the article needs some improvements before it can be ready for publication.

First, the first two sections (Introduction and green product) are lacking much recent literature extremely relevant to the topic. Indeed, in these sections, almost all the citations are more than 10 years old. I strongly suggest the authors to enrich these two sections with recent literature. Using the keywords [("cultural value" OR "value perception" OR "success" OR "preference" OR "acceptance") & ("eco-design" OR "sustainable design") & (product)] I am sure that many relevant articles published in the last 3 years will appear. Moreover, an eco-design pillar (Vezzoli, C., & Manzini, E. (2008). Design for environmental sustainability. London: Springer.) is missing. In (Vezzoli & Manzini, 2008) you could find many eco-design strategies and principles you mentioned.

Second, from a methodological point of view, section 3 and part of section 4 are very very similar to a material published by the authors in a previous article (Ghazali, I., Rashid, S. H. A., Dawal, S. Z. M., Aoyama, H., Tontowi, A. E., & Ghazilla, R. A. R. (2018). Green product preferences with respect to cultural influences: Empirical study in Indonesia. International Journal of Automation Technology, 12(6), 842-852.). However, this paper was not mentioned and the results were not compared or discussed. I think it is appropriate to mention it and highlight the elements of overlap and originality.

Other issues:

• The introduction of table 4 is not clear and comprehensive enough. I suggest to combine table 4 with table 6. In addition, to better detail the relationship between problem and solution in the text.
• The conclusions have to be extended, especially by comparing the results obtained with those already existing (in recent literature it is possible to find guidelines that aim to consider the consumers, their preferences, and their values in the eco-design field)

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The article invites product designers to question the real needs of the target audience and therefore reinforces the user's study phase as a fundamental practice in design methodology. For this reason, this reviewer considers that the article is interesting for product design teams and can contribute to improving the quality of products and thus prevent rejected or short-lived products from reaching the market, contributing to the ecology of the planet. However, there are two comments that should be taken into account. One relates to the approach with which the work has been carried out and the second to the quality of the references used.

Points to improve:

• The design guide resulting from this study is a guide based on general public, and the preferences of a particular, smaller, and more specialised public may be different. In fact, the DS-1 and DS-2 designers in table 8 make similar contributions.
•  The references used in table 1 are between 10 and 26 years old. More current sources should be used in a subject as topical as sustainability. In fact, the generation of the hypotheses is made on bibliographical references up to 40 years old and give rise to statements such as the one made in lines 132-135 on the male and female genders. Therefore, an unsustainable hypothesis is generated. Authors are advised to use references from the last 5 years.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors sufficiently met the reviewer's requirements. 

Author Response

The authors sufficiently met the reviewer's requirements. 

Response:

On behalf all Authors, I really appreciate your excellent contribution to improve the quality of this paper. once again, Thank you very much