A Case Study in Natural Fibre Material (Luffa Sponge) Development Using E²-Material-Driven Design

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

sustainability-2920632

The title of the manuscript is “Emotional Threads of Sustainability: A Case Study in Natural Fibre Material（Loofah Spong）Development Using E²- Material Driven Design” and I was quite astonished reading its content. It is the most non-concise manuscript I have ever read.

What was the point of these studies and actually what are the results? The manuscript is very long but in my opinion contains only a few vague opinions and many empty sentences without real meaning. The authors even included the following entry (lines 22-1129):

“The structure of the subsequent sections is as follows. Section two provides a detailed review of related work. Section three unfolds the specific experimental process. Section four is dedicated to discussion. The final section concludes the research. We employ the MDD approach to explore the traditional fibre material luffa sponge. We attempt to unearth the emotional experiences with luffa sponge that have received less attention and infuse these into products. Although luffa sponge is the material chosen for this study, both the MDD and emotional design principles have universality. It is hoped that this work will offer new design perspectives for showcasing the value and exploring the experiences of other traditional materials.”

Figure 2 contains graphic references to 14 emotions in PrEmo regarding consumer evaluations. It identifies also male and female individuals. Do the authors think that everyone who can read is unaware of the meaning of, for example, the word “joy” or “sadness”?

I can’t see any point in publishing such manuscripts.

English is ok.

Author Response

Please see the attachment, thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

REVIEW

on article

Emotional Threads of Sustainability: A Case Study in Natural Fibre Material

（Loofah Spong）Development Using E²- Material Driven Design

Chao Li, Luzhen Wang, Le Zhang

SUMMARY

The article submitted for review is devoted to the current topic of sustainable development. It examines a case study in natural fibre material, namely loofah spong, development, using E² - material driven design. This method, called E²-MDD, offers a solution with emotional and environmental indicators at the product level for the sustainable development of natural materials. This method is important and relevant. It involves several steps, and the authors tested it on samples of loofah spong, considered a type of traditional fiber source. The authors identified three key emotional qualities of materials, such as associativity, uniqueness and biophilicity. Ultimately, they found that E²-MDD can enhance the emotional and environmental connection between people and products. All this allows us to achieve the goals of sustainable development. The reviewer believes that the authors’ article generally corresponds to the subject matter of the journal “Sustainability”, contains new useful data that have research scientific novelty and have applied significance, that is, can be applied for the purposes of sustainable development. The reviewer believes that the article could be published in the journal Sustainability, but only after some changes were made to it. To this end, the reviewer has prepared several comments that are intended to make the article better. They are listed below.

COMMENTS

1. The reviewer believes that the title is presented in an overly heavy manner. The topic and focus of the article appears to be in the method E²-MDD. Therefore, it should be the focus of the article title and the first part of the title, “Emotional Threads of Sustainability,” should be removed from the title. This will be more accurate.

2. The authors did not formulate the research problem. Moreover, the abstract does not contain either a formulation of the scientific problem or an applied problem. Although the challenge seems to be the underexplored emotional potential of natural fiber materials in sustainable development and use. And the applied problem is a specific lack of knowledge and skills in the field of achieving emotional-ecological connections between people and products, in particular, using the example of the loofah sponge.

3. Authors are invited to supplement the keywords slightly, in terms of the unique and inherent terms used in this article. It might be worth adding keywords like “sustainable design” and “emotions.”

4. The authors took a somewhat strange approach to the formation of the first sections of the article, such as “Introduction” and “Literature review”. The fact is that most likely these sections should be combined, calling them “Introduction”. In this case, a literature review should be presented, which should be completed with the formulation of a scientific problem, an applied task, the purpose of the research, and scientific novelty. That is, the authors must present the background that exists in this direction, created by previous researchers, formulate the scientific deficit and build their formulations from there.

5. The authors are recommended to change the design of Figure 2. After all, this is a serious scientific journal and cartoon images of people may confuse the reader, who may assume that this is an article of an entertaining, journalistic or informational advertising nature. The graphic element in Figure 2 should be given a more strict appearance. The second thing to note about this picture is its content. Unfortunately, the text shown in this figure is difficult to read. It needs to be brought to a higher quality. You should not put dots after the name of the picture; this is incorrect from a design point of view.

6. The “Methods” section, perhaps, should still be supplemented with the word “Materials” and called “Materials and methods”, because the authors worked on certain scientific and practical data.

7. I would like to wish the authors to provide a general flow chart of the research, which will show all the scientific and practical iterations they have carried out. And the research flowchart should end with the formulation of the scientific result.

8. The photographs in Figure 5, Figure 6, and Figures 7 and 8 should be replaced and presented in higher quality. They contain indistinguishable images and unreadable text.

9. The “Discussion” section is presented by a discussion of the results obtained, but perhaps it should be somewhat strengthened. In particular, clear formulations of the scientific novelty and practical significance of the research are needed.

10. Conclusions, on the contrary, are presented very vaguely and briefly. They should be numbered and indicate the scientific result, the applied practical result, prospects for the development of the research in the future, that is, indicate the directions and vectors of development of this research in the field of sustainable development or related scientific areas, as well as recommendations for a specific applied practical field, as the authors indicated in the title of the article is “Case study”.

11. The list of references includes 71 titles, but noteworthy is the large number of studies older than the last 5-10, or even 20 years. This is not entirely correct, since the authors address the modern issue of sustainable development in its current aspect. Approaches have changed, the global sustainable development agenda is changing. The list of references should be supplemented with 15-20 works published over the past 5 years.

Once changes are made as per the comments, the article will become more suitable for publication in a scientific journal and may be considered for publication in the journal Sustainability.

 Minor editing of English language required

Author Response

Please refer to the attachment, thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Sorry for my rudeness, it may be due to the different fields involved or the different requirements of the journal. This article doesn't seem to be as scientific to me. Nevertheless, based on its abundant data and research group, I am still willing to recommend its publication after minor revisions. My suggestion is to clearly label the text in some figures that contain a lot of content as much as possible.

Author Response

Please refer to the attachment, thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

The authors developed a novel E2-MDD approach by integrating Material Driven Design with sub-methods to evaluate the emotional characteristics and ecological performance of natural materials, in which the luffa sponge samples were employed as typical natural fibre resources to demonstrate the model feasibility. Also, the proposed method provides expanded application scenario on further exploration of characteristics of other natural materials. This work is well organized and structured, with enough experimental and analytical data supporting the key points raised by the authors. Thus, I suggest the acceptance of this paper after considering the following comments:

1.    Please include references No. also in figure caption if those figures are quoted from literature, e.g., Figures 1 and 2.

2.    Please provide detailed descriptions in figure caption from Figures 5 and 6, instead of a simply “Experimental sample summary”.

3.    For the sustainability study of natural materials especially bio-based materials, citation of the follow reference is suggested for a broader readership, e.g., 10.1016/j.carbpol.2023.120537

Author Response

Please refer to the attachment, thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper was corrected and can be publlished in its present state.

English is good.