• Soft Skills

The teaching proposes an approach to System Design for Sustainability.
The educational objective is to supply the sensitivity, knowledge, methodology and instruments needed to design Service Product Systems that are environmentally, socio-ethically and economically sustainable. The teaching proposes instruments for evaluating the environmental and social unsustainability quality of an existing system to be redesigned and defining the intervention priorities; the generation of ideas on systems aimed at environmental, social and economic sustainability; representation of the sustainability characteristics of a system concept; the evaluation and representation of the system concept sustainability improvements that were developed.
This course is proposed by the School as an optional teaching group, with innovative education characteristics that support students as they acquire and strengthen their transversal skills.

Students:
- know and understand the instruments for designing Service Product Systems that are environmentally, socially, economically sustainable;
- can apply the instruments studied to the project;
- autonomously and in a group develop skills for critically analysing the context;
- elaborate creative processes aimed at sustainability.

The course proposes to the theory and practice of System Design for Sustainability, i.e. Product-Service System design for Sustainability with a focus on Distributed Economies (DE).

The course is framed into the LeNS international network of nearly 150 Universities form all continents, aiming at the diffusion of Design for Sustainability with an open access ethos, i.e. free access to courses (videos, slides and books), case studies/criteria, tools and projects (www.lens-international.org).

The course is structured into two parts: a first theoretical part and a design exercise part, based on a Sustainable Product-Service System Project.

The theory presents the following topics:

· Sustainable development and design: the reference framework

· The evolution of design for sustainability

· Introduction to product Life Cycle Design (LCD)

· Sustainable Product-Service System (S.PSS)

· Sustainable Distributed Economies (DE)

· System Design for Sustainability (SDS)

· Methods and tools for System Design for Sustainability.

The design exercise part brief consists in:
Design a Sustainable eating System, based on the promising models of Sustainable Product-Service Systems (S.PSS) applied to Distributed Economy (DE), for the Politecnico di Milano Bovisa Campus.

There are no pre-requisites for attendance.

For students ATTENDING the course, the exam evaluation consists of:
- a written exam about the theory treated during the ex-cathedra lectures (40% of the evaluation);
- an evaluation of the capability and the correctness in using the sustainability design-orienting tools during the exercise conducted in class (done in group) (30% of the evaluation);
- an evaluation of the sustainability quality of the concept developed during the exercise (done in group) (30% of the evaluation).
If the evaluation of the written exam is below the passing mark, or the student was absent during the test, or the students wish to improve the achieved mark, she/he has the opportunity to do an oral exam (same as for the written exam 40% of the evaluation).
The final evaluation consists in the weighted average of the marks achieved in the written/oral exam (40%) and during the design exercise (30% + 30%).

For NON-ATTENDING students, the exam is made up of a discussion of a written relation about an existing sustainable Product-Service System (format will be available on BeeP), and of an oral exam based on the declared theory/bibliography.