Resumen de Teaching design for environment through critique within a project-based product design course
William Z. Bernstein, Devarajan Ramanujan, Fu Zhao, Karthik Ramani, Monica F. Cox
Future environmental regulations are creating new employment requirements within traditional engineering organizations. Theseorganizations require recent graduates to have a strong handle on environmental issues related to new product development. Sincemechanical engineering curricula are saturated with courses covering a broad spectrum of engineering fundamentals, there is littleroom to develop a separate course to teach principles related to sustainable product design. This manuscript presents a novel method for teaching Design for Environment (DfE) strategies within a mechanical engineering product design course through theuse of expert critiques. The results from this study indicate that integration of a critique based module within an existing designproject is an effective medium for teaching sustainable product design. Also, receiving feedback in the form of disruptive designcritiques breeds innovative design modifications that lower the energy and carbon footprints of the design across multiple lifecyclestages. More importantly, the results indicate that after participating in this teaching module, students are more likely to apply thelearned DfE principles within academia and industry.
