Integration of sustainability in regular courses: experiences in industrial design engineering

The integration of sustainability issues into a regular industrial design engineering product innovation course is a challenge. Simply requiring that studentʹs assignments show sustainable product concepts that are also sound from a traditional business perspective is neither motivating nor realistic. Experiences at Delft University of Technology show that in course development, one of the most important aspects is credibility in written (supervision) and spoken form (business case description, course format). Additionally, putting sustainability in a wider scope, to include social issues like safety, is likely to build enthusiasm with both students and staff without sustainability backgrounds, and is likely to result in better learning processes and assignments, with a higher credibility and more acceptance.