Teaching Multinational, Multidisciplinary Sustainable Product Development

Abstract

This paper describes a multinational program aimed at teaching processes and methods for sustainable product development using multidisciplinary project-based teams. The foundation course teaches processes for designing sustainable products and services, metrics and evaluation methods through a combination of lectures, project work, and examination of actual business cases. It is to be followed by courses on green manufacturing and pre-commercialization planning. The program features bi-national collaboration between the U.S. and Mexico, motivated by our shared vision for the development of sustainable solutions in a global context. The exploratory foundation course of the program, Design for Sustainability, was taught in Fall 2007 at the University of California at Berkeley with students and faculty members from 14 disciplines and three institutions: University of California at Berkeley (UCB), the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, and the National University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. This paper describes the course content, project experiences, faculty evaluation and student lessons learned from the foundation course as well as a proposed three-phase strategy for future program development.

Diseñando el cambio. La innovación social y sus retos

“…Este factor, si bien no deja de ser importante en la práctica, ha sido superado a través del diseño centrado en la persona y para la innovación social a través del trabajo colaborativo (Morelli, 2007, Manzini, 2015Alatorre, 2015;Ortíz Nicolás, 2016). Desde la década de los 70s se ha sugerido el trabajo multidisciplinario en la disciplina del diseño (Papanek, 1985) y actualmente existen resultados concretos (Agogino, et al 2008, Equihua et al, 2011, sin embargo, es una tarea que necesita más tiempo y dedicación para consolidarse. El trabajo multidisciplinario representa un desafío general para nuestra disciplina, y superarlo representará beneficios que podrán reflejarse tanto en proyectos de innovación social como a los orientados al mercado o a la tecnología.…”