Integrating sustainability into product design curriculum and instruction

In the creation of a new product many critical decisions are made during the conceptual and design phases that lock-in the product's life-time impacts. Most designers are not fully aware of the far-reaching detrimental, benign or restorative consequences of their design decisions. The challenge lies in the gap between the body of knowledge about sustainable production and what is taught to product design students. This research is about filling that gap with redesigned curriculum and instruction.;An expanded educational framework of sustainability values for product design in industrial design and engineering is proposed, reflecting the product design profession's recent awareness of this expanded sphere of influence. In the already overloaded traditional curricula there is a need to strengthen the creative problem-solving core and integrate sustainability principles, policies and strategies into all courses. Future designers will need to be ADVOCATES for the end user, for the makers of the products and for the maker's and user's communities. They will need to value SCIENCE and be willing and able to consider scientific information to enhance their design decisions. They will need to create CONNECTIONS by thinking globally, ecologically and economically, considering systems-wide consequences, and embracing interdisciplinary empathy.;Using this sustainability values framework, educational activities related to product design and industrial materials are redesigned, implemented and the students' learning assessed. New and reworked design projects, cases studies and reflective writing assignments are developed and used in a product design course over 3 semesters. For a course in industrial materials a new educational tool, an Illustrated Material Life-Cycle (iMLC) project, is created and implemented. This iMLC project provides a lifecycle framework for the students to create their own connections between sustainability issues and the materials used in products, revealing the larger picture of the biophysical economic system and developing a 'systems thinking' frame of mind. Assessment of student learning in the sustainability values areas reveals success of the educational tools and activities along with a need to increase students' overall literacy in the sciences including ecology.