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.

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:

On August 17, 2011, Spartech launched its new R&D facility. Sustainable Minds CEO had the pleasure of attending the event. This facility was designed expressly for Spartech to collaborate with partners and customers in early stage product development to create more sustainable products. Additional information can be found at http://www.spartech.com/08-17-11-tech-center.html

Reposted from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt blog.

The International Contemporary Furniture Fair is a fun place to visit each year for new trends and ideas in commercial design.

Sustainability was a hot theme in the school projects represented at the ICFF: ICFF School

One project in particular highlights a rising trend in product design and marketing. The product-design program of the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts challenged students to develop a piece of furniture out of a single sheet of plywood. While the brief was interesting enough, flat-pack design is not new. The important twist here was a lifecycle analysis (LCA) of each design, comparing the furniture on various metrics such as materials, fasteners, glues, and shipping volume, using software by Sustainable Minds. It was fascinating to see how each design had greater or fewer impacts based on decisions such as having a flat or a curved seat. What if every product in this year’s ICFF had undergone the same LCA?

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