• Soft Skills

The students attending the course System Design for Sustainability will be able to design Sustainable Product-Service System (S.PSS), with a focus on Distributed Economies (DE), i.e. win-win business/offer models where the economic interest of the provider/s continuously seeks environmentally and/or socioethically beneficial new solutions. 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.

The student:
- acquires the knowledge-base of sustainable development and the role the designer can play into it.

- learn how to use methods and tools to orientate the system design process towards win-win environmentally, socioethically and economically sustainable solutions; 
- at the end of the course the student is able to use the acquired knowledge and adapt the skills in relation to various socio-economic contexts as well in relation to various type of organizations, such us companies, Governmental Institution, non-governmental organizations, citizen associations, etc.

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 organised in two parts.

The first part is dedicated to the learning the following themes: 

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 Learning of the above-mentioned themes could be made by following a series of ex-cathedra lectures, or by watching their video (lectures are video recorded), or studying on a proper book and/or the course slides.

The second part of the course is dedicated to an exercise, that is a design simulation, which has two objectives: the first is to dialogically review with students the key topics covered in the first part of the course along a design process; the second is to show how and when to use the environmentally and socioethically design-orienting and assessment tools during a development process.

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.