ENGS 171 - Sustainable Product Design

Description

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.

Prerequisites

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.

Notes

Prior to Winter 2025, ENGS 171 was taught under the title "Industrial Ecology."