We received this note last week from Allan Chochinov--our friend and Editor in Chief of Core77--and offered to share it with our readers.

Two years ago, I was invited to put together a new MFA program at the School of Visual Arts around a new way of considering the design of artifacts, experiences, sustainability, strategy, business and point of view. (Well, that’s what I ended up putting together, anyway!) And so the MFA in Products of Design was born. It’s a very progressive program, with a strong mission and an incredible faculty of design practitioners, entrepreneurs, seasoned educators, and media professionals. I’ve been a design educator for over 16 years, and with help and extraordinary contributions from colleagues, advisors, architects, professionals and friends, we have created a program that I feel represents an optimistic, rigorous and future-forward step in the future of design education.

Using Sustainable Minds, the team at Bresslergroup reinvented the common wooden shipping reel to create exponential environmental improvement AND cost savings for KALAS Wire –a very tangible benefit. Improving environmental performance increased their ROI.
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Using Sustainable Minds, the team at fredsparks identified multiple viable frame materials with real impact reductions. Thus, Misura Eye Wear was born out of the Latin definition of misura – to measure.
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Environmental performance is the newest criteria for product development. It sits alongside traditional criteria such as functional performance, cost, ergonomics, aesthetics, safety, market demand, etc…

Using Sustainable Minds, the team at Bresslergroup reinvented the common wooden shipping reel to create exponential environmental improvement AND cost savings for KALAS Wire –a very tangible benefit. Improving environmental performance increased their ROI.
Watch the webcast >

“Sustainable Minds helps establish the ethical aspect of sustainability by providing more credibility to product design, manufacture and distribution decisions. It has changed the game, for the better.”
– Mathieu Turpault, Director of Design, Partner

Using Sustainable Minds, the team at fredsparks identified multiple viable frame materials with real impact reductions. Thus, Misura Eye Wear was born out of the Latin definition of misura – to measure.
Watch the webcast >

Collaboration Creates Comprehensive Data Set for Plastics Processors

Cambridge, MA – September 20, 2011 – Sustainable Minds, the industry leader in on-demand, eco-concept modeling and life cycle assessment software for product development and manufacturing, today announced new strategic customer, Spartech Corporation. Spartech, a leader in the development and design of rigid packaging, is using Sustainable Minds on-demand software to quickly quantify the environmental impacts associated with the production of their products. By entering information about the product’s attributes, Sustainable Minds software calculates the life cycle environmental impacts for air, land, water and human health, as well as carbon footprint.

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

This is a repost of Al Dean's review of Sustainable Minds 2.0.
Read the review on DEVELOP3D >
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Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is increasingly pushing towards the cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS). Al Dean takes a look at one of the industry’s pioneers.

Life Cycle Assessment is a corner-stone of any environmentally aware organisation’s toolkit, but there’s one serious issue if you’re looking to both integrate environmental impact assessment as part of your design process - particularly at the early stages.

Many of the historical solutions are mono- lithic systems targetting in-depth, expert led analyses once a product is complete. As such, they aren’t suited to the rapid fire, often quick and dirty conceptualisation and product development process.

Into this comes Sustainable Minds (SM) and its cloud-based service.

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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