Ecodesign: what to teach in specialised or generic engineering education

Anne-Marie Jolly (1)

1 PRISME - Laboratoire Pluridisciplinaire de Recherche en Ingénierie des Systèmes, Mécanique et Energétique

We have now enough background in teaching of ecodesign to make some conclusion on best practices in this area: in France this is very supported by studies of APEDEC (Association of Experts for the development of EcoDesign) that published in 2006 and 2010 the results of enquiries on those teachings. Curricula concerning ecodesign exist since 1987 but a significant number of graduates exist only since 1995, more often in engineering universities or design institutes In 2006 curriculum including at least 20 hours on ecodesign were 22 in France, they are 80 in 2010. In 2006, 7 of them could be considered as expert dedicated curriculum, 9 as leading to an ability to realize an ecodesign study and 6 as basic educations. One or two days curriculum is considered as only as able to give an idea about the field of ecodesign. At this moment the strong link was between design and ecology: at the beginning, first people to teach in this field were people making also researches in the field, often in link with material sciences (wood, textile, cars, and domestic use devices). In 2009 the threshold of 3000 graduates in ecodesign was gone over in France but only 20 curriculums can be considered as expert dedicated curriculum. At the beginning teachers dedicated much time to tools for environmental evaluation and ecolabels, they were devoted to practical realization of LCA, very often with the use of the software considered as the reference in the domain of application. When ISO 14062 norms appeared, it was also a great tendency to include it in the teaching of integrated management subjects. Now we teach ecodesign for services with a complementary view on usages but in the perspective of economy and societal impact. The development of entrepreneurship educations leads us to include the benefits of ecodesign for development of enterprises that made this choice and the link between ecodesign and innovation. Slow design is a more global view of things it is now considered as a component of ecodesign and taught in this concept integrating ethics consideration. The paper makes a description of those evolutions in teaching ecodesign and present typologies of curricula.

Mots clés: innovation; ecodesign

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]

Anne-Marie Jolly. Ecodesign: what to teach in specialised or generic engineering education. 2013. ⟨hal-00837613⟩