Teaching Design for Environment through Critique within a Project-Based Product Design Course*

Future environmental regulations are creating new employment requirements within traditional engineering organizations. These organizations require recent graduates to have a strong handle on environmental issues related to newproduct development. Sincemechanical engineering curricula are saturated with courses covering a broad spectrumof engineering fundamentals, there is little room to develop a separate course to teach principles related to sustainable product design. This manuscript presents a novel method for teaching Design for Environment (DfE) strategies within a mechanical engineering product design course through the use of expert critiques. The results from this study indicate that integration of a critique basedmodule within an existing design project is an effectivemedium for teaching sustainable product design. Also, receiving feedback in the form of disruptive design critiques breeds innovative design modifications that lower the energy and carbon footprints of the design acrossmultiple lifecycle stages.More importantly, the results indicate that after participating in this teaching module, students are more likely to apply the learned DfE principles within academia and industry.