Design for Sustainability Part 3 – Business & Social Strategies (Self Study)

In the Design for Sustainability Part 3: Business and Social Strategies microcredential, you learn the business and social design strategies that enable your technical solutions to succeed in the real world. This course equips you with the tools to build support for your sustainability work, including making the business case, strengthening communication and collaboration skills, and aligning your design decisions with organizational goals and constraints. You will explore green business strategies such as product-service systems, the Presidio booster for Business Model Canvas, and Backcasting.

You will also learn to design for (and with) diversity, inclusion, and equity, and how to design user experiences to drive behavior change toward sustainable lifestyles. You will learn 12 Leverage Points thinking for dynamic systems, and will examine globally significant laws and eco-labels to understand both compliance requirements and best-in-class performance benchmarks. By the end of the course, you will be able to connect technical solutions to business viability and societal impact, helping you influence decisions, lead change, and implement sustainability strategies in real-world product, service, or system development.

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

• Apply social strategies for sustainable design, including design for behavior change, communication without greenwashing, and collaboration / leadership skills.
• Make the business case to support sustainability initiatives, including ROI calculations and conversational tools to effectively recruit stakeholder support.
• Apply sustainable business strategies, including product service systems, backcasting, and the Presidio booster for business model canvas.
• Practice design for, and design with, equity and inclusion.
• Incorporate concerns of sustainability regulations, certifications, and system dynamics into product-level designs.

Who should attend?

This course is designed for engineers, industrial designers, product managers, entrepreneurs, and sustainability or strategy professionals who need to connect technical sustainability solutions to business success and societal impact, including building support from stakeholders, and driving implementation. It is ideal for learners who want to align sustainability efforts with organizational goals, improve collaboration, and lead change 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
  • Behavior change
  • Business Models PSS
  • The Natural Step Backcasting
  • Equity & Inclusion
  • Collaboration and Leadership

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.