ENGS 171 Sustainable Product Design

A product's environmental impacts result from its design, manufacturing, use, and end-of-life choices. Sustainable design identifies economic ways to improve these environmental impacts, chiefly by designing for low-impact materials, circular material flows, dematerialization, energy efficiency, and system thinking. It may also extend to changing user behavior and switching from selling a consumer product to providing a service. The objectives of this course are to become proficient with these approaches, to learn the associated tools, and–above all–to practice these by redesigning a product for the environment in a term-long team project. Projects need to fall under a specify theme, which varies with every offering of the course. Student activities include critical reviews of current literature, working on in-class exercises, pursuit of the term-long project, and defending their design in front of a review board.

Prerequisite

For continuing students at Thayer School: ENGS 21 and ENGS 37. For other students: Instructor permission based on a general understanding of environmental impacts of human activities as well as prior experience with engineering design and team project.