No abstract

Environmental regulations and public pressure lead more and more companies to adopt an ecodesign approach. Nevertheless, this desirable change is slowed down by some difficulties in integrating the ecodesign tools and methods in the already complex product's development process. In parallel to other initiatives which try to develop global platforms with interoperable tools or to propose management tools to drive the ecodesign integration, we believe that a knowledge centered approach is necessary to support the ecodesign processes in a perennial way. Thus, the aim of this paper is to identify situations in which lack of knowledge can affect ecodesign activities and how to overcome these difficulties. A brief literature review emphasizes the key role of knowledge in design and explains the reasons why this role is exacerbated in ecodesign. Based on empirical material and academic papers, we define some scenarios that illustrate some key knowledge issues in ecodesign, and that show how some functionalities could help to overcome these difficulties during the design process. Finally, we suggest integrating those functionalities into a collaborative platform. Focused on interactions between the ecodesign stakeholders, its main purpose would be to support knowledge construction and knowledge sharing.

Nowadays, our society needs that an awareness be made about our impact on the planet. Many more or less alarmist reports tell us that there is a need to change our consumption patterns, production and energy consumption … One of the main axes to achieve these goals is education. Thus integrating sustainable development into the skills of future engineers is an essential challenge but above all a necessity to modify and reduce our impact on the environment and to allow a global understanding of the complexity of our society. For this, companies must also evolve. Some will do so in a strategy of greening their image, others will have to comply with the various regulations of their sector of activity and a final category of these companies will use this opportunity as a vector of innovation. Each at their level will make a contribution, the integration over time of new sustainability skills within their staff will expand their action. In this article, we will focus our study on the integration of ecodesign in the industry and the impact that this generates in terms of skills to acquire, values to evolve and knowledge to master.

To face environmental requirements in the design area, it is crucial to work on the education of younger generation to sustainable design. But literature shows there is a growing need for both teachers and learners to develop pedagogical support to help the integration of sustainable concerns and tools in the education. This article focuses on Life Cycle Assessment in the scope of an ecodesign process. Through a case study, the aim is to illustrate it with firstly a succinct version of the LCA of an electric kettle and then suggestions of ecodesign strategies based on the outcomes of the LCA.

The sustainability concept is becoming ingrained in the international engineering community. The next generation of engineers has to be trained to appreciate economic, environmental, and societal impacts of its decisions, with an international perspective and at a local and global scale. The aim of this paper is to contribute to identifying the strengths and limits of current sustainability education practices to will be able to improve future decision-makers' and product designers' training. The first step of our research concerns the identification of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values associated with sustainability and ecodesign to highlight what kind of engineers' competencies for sustainability have to be trained. Based on this identification, we examine the French education system from secondary school to university to study sustainability and ecodesign integration in different technological French curricula and practices. The objective is to estimate the effective place of sustainable development and ecodesign in the technological training courses. We analyze programs and complete our approach by observing teachers in their classrooms or by conducting interviews. Even if concepts, knowledge and skills related to ecodesign appear in many different programs, our study emphasizes that there is not a continuum between pre-secondary school, high school, and university. As a consequence, teachers have difficulties to understand the aims and the coherence of the program, and students are not really comfortable with the issues of sustainability and ecodesign. We propose to improve programs and practices by developing multidisciplinary curricula covering most of the sustainable issues and integrating best practices of international universities.