IDES 550 Product Lifecycles and Flows

College of Art, Media & Design CAMD Cross-College

1.5 credits 30.0 hours
500 level graduate course

This graduate seminar explores the systems within which products are designed, manufactured, distributed, and marketed. Through readings, discussions, and lectures by faculty and industry professionals, as well as site visits to fabricators, distributors, and design studios, students learn about the rapidly evolving industrial landscape. Case studies of innovative product design, manufacturing culture, and economic models, and especially the impact of new technologies on the process of design and fabrication of products, provide students with several frameworks for contemporary product design: from understanding complex material and energy flows across economies, to the different stages a product passes through during its lifecycle, to the need for optimization of material cycles from virgin to finished material, to part or component, from product to waste product. Special focus is given to industrial ecology as a system for describing and designing sustainable ecologies.

Priority enrollment to MID majors.
This course is not repeatable for credit.