The demand of sustainable products - not only in transport, but in manufacturing and building industry - results to the necessary of improving the reliability. The MTBF-index (mean time between failures) and MTBM (mean time between maintenance) have been introduced, to include the reliability of products in the profitability analysis. On the technical side, international standards describe how to test the reliability of a product or component by means of constant failure rate or constant failure intensity. The demand of sustainable products results in a redesign with new targets. The challenge for the designer is to (re-)design the technical system with improved material and/or optimized shape. Therefore the paper will discuss the material selection methods for a "design for durability". As a consequence it will show the influence of embodiment design when designing with advanced ceramics. The autor has worked on failure criteria of multi-axial loaded ceramics and investigated several cyclic and static load cases on ceramic structure specimen. Based on this experiences a guideline will be proposed for the embodiment design evaluation of cermic parts.
