Design for Sustainability Part 2: Technical Strategies (Self Study)

In Design for Sustainability Part 2: Technical Solutions microcredential, you move from measuring sustainability to ideating and strategizing real, technically grounded solutions. This course equips you with the engineering strategies needed to improve product sustainability across the entire life cycle. From material selection to transport, energy use, product lifetime extension, and end-of-life recovery. Through practical tools and methods, you will learn how to design for circularity using strategies such as durability, repair, remanufacturing, recycling, and compostability, while also optimizing energy effectiveness and potentially integrating on-board renewable energy.

Framed through Whole System Mapping and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), the course emphasizes evidence based decision-making while pushing out-of-the-box innovation. You will learn how to choose which strategies to apply, when to apply them, and how to balance tradeoffs between environmental, technical, and business constraints in real-world engineering contexts. By the end of the course, you will be able to generate both incremental and radical redesign concepts and evaluate them with confidence, transforming sustainability from an abstract goal into practical, actionable design decisions for concept development, detailed design, and redesign.

By participating in this course, you will learn how to successfully:

• Choose and source sustainable materials for a selected product, balancing environmental impacts (LCA), cost, and performance constraints.
• Analyze use-phase energy consumption and develop optimized design interventions to demonstrably reduce it.
• Apply circular design strategies (design for durability, repair, upgrade, and remanufacturing) to increase product lifespan.
• Apply design strategies for material recovery at a product s end of life (recycling, composting).
• Integrate and prioritize multiple sustainable design strategies using Whole System Mapping, to optimize environmental, technical, and business trade-offs or synergies.

Who should attend?

This course is for engineers, designers, product managers, entrepreneurs, and sustainability or strategy professionals who want to develop and apply technical solutions for product sustainability. It is ideal for those building on foundational LCA knowledge who must creatively solve technical problems, make high-leverage solutions with minimal time and effort, evaluate trade-offs, and make evidence-based design decisions in real-world product, service, or system development.

Course Materials (included in purchase of course)

• Digital course notes via ASME s Learning Hub
• Exercises and resources from Sustainable Design from Vision to Action
  • Whole System Mapping Exercise 
  • Material Choice Exercise
  • Energy Priorities Exercise
  • Lifetime Extension Exercise
  • Design for Recycling Exercise

Supplemental Course Materials (not included with course, purchase separately)

Sustainable Design from Vision to Action - Sustainable Design from Vision to Action - 1st Edition - by Jeremy Faludi.

A Certificate of Completion and Digital Badge will be issued to registrants who successfully complete the course by achieving a passing score of 75% or higher on the final exam.