On December 4th, we held the fourth in a series of webcasts that feature educators from leading colleges and universities demonstrating how Sustainable Minds is being used in education. From new sustainability degree programs to traditional engineering programs, educators from a broad range of disciplines are using Sustainable Minds to teach lifecycle thinking through hands-on experience.

Jon Keng, Mercyanne Andes, Millali Marcano, and Sunyoung Bang are students in the Tufts Gordon Institute Masters in Engineering Management program. As a part of the program, students are engaged in short-term consulting projects to allow them to experience real-world challenges. They chose Sustainable Minds as their sponsor company for their summer practicum project.

Vers founder, David Laituri, clearly knows what it means to create a more sustainable product. One of his philosophies is the concept of ‘Chi-eco’ (pronounced chee-co). A customer buys a Vers product because of design and performance first (chic), and environmental performance second (eco). This philosophy truly helped Vers’ recent Kickstarter campaign achieve a 1946% funding goal and raise almost $200,000. David certainly knows how use ‘greener’ to drive product innovation that leads to new revenues.

When the team first met David, we were impressed by his extensive experience with product manufacturing and deep interest in sustainability. Every Vers component and process was already developed with sustainability in mind. It was a challenge: how can we improve on an already lean, sustainable design? Working with the team at Sustainable Minds has expanded our applicability of sustainability in product design and development. The key is to look at all of the phases of a product’s life cycle.

Jon Keng, Mercyanne Andes, Millali Marcano, and Sunyoung Bang are students in the Tufts Gordon Institute Masters in Engineering Management program (shown here with Professor Sam Liggero). As a part of the program, students are engaged in short-term consulting projects to allow them to experience real-world challenges. With experience in technical companies such as Momenta, General Electric, and BD Biosciences, they chose Sustainable Minds as their sponsor company for their summer practicum project.

After finishing our first year in the Masters in Engineering Management program at Tufts Gordon Institute, we’d learned that design for the environment has become a key part of many companies’ business strategy. As professionals in the fields of Research and Development and Manufacturing, we can now visualize starting new product development or redesign projects using the full capabilities of Sustainable Minds. Sustainable Minds’ powerful software can be used to evaluate the environmental impacts in any stage of a product’s life cycle, and when applied to all can have tremendous impact.

On August 28th, we held the third in a series of webcasts that feature educators from leading colleges and universities demonstrating how Sustainable Minds is being used in education. Sustainable Minds merges practice and science, ecodesign and LCA. This webcast showcases three educators and practitioners – teaching materials, industrial design and geography – demonstrating their success stories. Educators with different expertise can use Sustainable Minds to teach lifecycle thinking through hands-on experience.

Cindy Bayley is a graduate of the University of California Berkeley in Mechanical Engineering, with a minor in Sustainable Design. She is an intern this summer with Sustainable Mind and is returning to UC Berkeley to pursue a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.

Sustainable Minds is being used to teach sustainability in a variety of disciplines, and in ways that were unexpected. The software is thought of as practical and tangible, and is inspiring a lot of new kinds of thinking. As we’ve learned how Sustainable Minds is being used, we've consistently found that both faculty and students have been excited, challenged, invigorated, and are thinking and collaborating in new ways. 

Hunter Lovins' post on triplepundit: The Importance of Embedding Sustainability in Secondary Education Curriculums  

"The business community is demanding candidates with sustainability training. Accenture found that over 93 percent of CEO's see sustainability as crucial to business success, with 88 percent stating it needs to be fully embedded into their strategy and operations."
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On May 24, we held the second in a series of webcasts that feature educators from leading colleges and universities demonstrating how Sustainable Minds is being used in education. This webcast showcases the creativity of two engineering and manufacturing educators discussing how they got started integrating Sustainable Minds into current projects and courses, and how they developed new ones. They reported not only a very high level of student engagement and enthusiasm, but a clear impact on students’ improved job marketability.

3 Schools / 3 Disciplines / 3 Educators
On April 24, we held the first in a series of webcasts on how Sustainable Minds is being used in education. Featuring three educators from three different disciplines at three leading institutions, each demonstrated and discussed the use of Sustainable Minds in their curriculum, expansion in their programs and the implications for the future. The range of disciplines represented by the presenters illustrates the interest and need for teaching life cycle thinking and action to all types of students – business, design and engineering – to prepare them for taking on the challenges and opportunities in the greener product economy.

CUSTOMER STORY WEBCAST SERIES 
Tues, April 24 at 2pm ET, 11am PT

Creating Knowledge Workers for the Greener Product Marketplace
3 Schools | 3 Disciplines | 3 Educators

WHAT: On April 24th, three prominent business, design and engineering educators will address an increasingly important challenge: How to integrate environmental sustainability into product development education to prepare students for jobs in the greener economy.

Add the life cycle data you need to model the environmental performance of your products.

Sustainable Minds enables product development teams to rapidly model the environmental performance of products in the earliest stages of R&D. Today, as environmental performance increasingly drives product innovation and differentiation, using industry average data is often not good enough. Manufacturers want data specific to their business processes and supply chain. SM’s unique cloud & service delivery means data can continually be updated and new data added so product teams have what they need, when they need it.

“Maybe the perfect cloud solution?” Al Dean, Executive Editor, DEVELOP3D

Our dataset grows as our customers grow. Now it's easy to request and add impact factors for the life cycle data you need to model your products. Use the Data Browser to view the current dataset and the SM Data Request Form to submit your requests. We help you describe and source, then verify and add the data you need for: