Product Design Engineering is a relatively new engineering discipline that combines
Mechanical Engineering studies with Industrial Design. The emergence and credibility of
this field has created graduates who can successfully combine the creative thinking of
design with the analytical thinking of engineering. A Product Design Engineer forms a vital
role in a product development team making it even more necessary to ensure graduates
from this field have sustainability embedded into their skill-set.
Product Design Engineers are at the forefront of product development; this in turn puts
them at the forefront of unsustainable patterns of production and consumption that
currently plague the manufacturing industry. Due to this, it is imperative to ensure all
Product Design Engineering outcomes have implemented sustainable practices to develop
quality products with environmental concerns in mind. Sustainable design has become
more prevalent and is no longer perceived to be purely organic design, or associated with
single actions such as recycling. It now also involves concepts of Product Stewardship and
Life Cycle Management, including how these concepts translate into current best practice
within leading global manufacturing companies. Knowledge of sustainable design has
developed through necessity and a better understanding in this area has helped create
successful, competitive products with less impact on the environment. The range of
theoretical or conceptual knowledge and tools available across the environmental design
spectrum are then practiced by the students as applied design methods within studio
projects.
This paper shows how sustainability is now embedded in Product Design Engineering
disciplines and does not only discuss the relevance of the content, but moreover addresses
this issue from of student perspective. Three cohorts of undergraduate Product Design
Engineering students have been surveyed to respond to individual comprehension of this
topic — and how effective this is — on their knowledge base. Two cohorts from Swinburne
University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, and the other from EAFIT University,
Medellin, Colombia. By doing this, an international perspective of educational experiences
in sustainability for Product Design Engineering can be obtained and is discussed in depth
within this paper.
DRS 2012 Bangkok
