Dr.Ing. Mette Mo Jakobsen
Associate Professor,
Department of Product Design Engineering,
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology,
Trondheim, Norway

Since 1997 an ecodesign course is taught for third year product design engineering students in Trondheim, Norway. Every year the main parts has been lectures based on dialog, exercises and student involvement, as well as projects performed by groups of about four students. Goals has been to get an overview of ecodesign, and through the project and the active involvement, enable the students to achieve a deeper understanding of the subject matter, and gain knowledge of evaluating, developing and strengthening the environmental performance of products and product-service-systems. Also ethic and moral aspects related to the design of products and systems for the future is discussed within the course. The focus on sustainable product service systems has increased every year, and more complex product-service-systems has been chosen as project case for the courses. This year the case has been on sustainable household, household waste and recycling within different world markets. The vision of the company involved is "Helping the world recycle". The current system involves a can and bottle take-back-machine, the beverage containers and their recycling loops. Drawing future scenarios for the problem areas has been one of the main activities to set the direction for the future. The method back-casting has been used. Mental visualisation, story writing as well as theatre play was introduced and performed in the order to establish scenarios for a sustainable future. These are tools that has proven to be successful for improving creative collaboration in design teams. Based on these exercises, the students continue working with their own scenarios within the project groups, and based on the described scenarios the groups go back and suggest steps for the company to go in the right direction. Within the suggested steps they choose one concept to work out into further detail. The paper will present the case studies, including future scenarios and strategies as well as discuss the methods used based on their suitfulness to educate students to be aware of, and able to develop, sustainable product service systems.

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Last updated: 13 November, 2008