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Seminar: The EcoLabOrative: An Interdisciplinary Collaborative Experiment in Sustainable Product Design Education

Professor Dale Murray Associate Professor of Industrial Design University of Cincinnati April 19, 2005, 5:30 pm, Lecture Center D

Seminar Details

Design education is one obvious arena in which to create new theories and methods in sustainable product design and development, to pass on this knowledge to young designers, and to impress upon them the importance and urgency of such endeavors. To that end, the EcoLabOrative was created. Advantages of this concurrent teaching model and the challenges associated with implementing and teaching a course series like this in a university will be discussed. The presentation will include descriptions of design problems and examples of student work and an examination of the kinds of knowledge, skills, and special understandings that should be imparted in any successful sustainable design course.

About Professor Murray

Dale Murray has taught Sustainable Product Design and Development Courses in the Industrial Design Program at the University of Cincinnati since 1999. . He has been engaged in Action Research with the expressed goal of trying out various approaches to sustainable design education, measuring and tracking results and reporting to other educators and practitioners what has been learned. In 2002, his findings led him to believe that a more effective and relevant approach to teaching this topic would be a series of courses that are interdisciplinary, and include design, engineering and business students. It was also believed that collaboration with industry, in which real world problems could be addressed with sustainability as a design goal, would be a great learning opportunity for both students and industry partners.