Sustainable Minds and IDSA Partner to Advance Greener Product Design Knowledge and Practice

Sustainable Minds and IDSA to bring education, expertise and software to IDSA members

01.11.2010 – Cambridge, MA – Sustainable Minds, a greener product design software and information company, today announced a partnership with the Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA), the leading organization representing product, interaction, experience and service design, to advance the adoption and integration of ecodesign and sustainability practices in product design. The partnership will bring together software and information to educate, inspire, and ensure that product development organizations have the knowledge, tools, and value systems in place to support greener product design practices.

Greener product design means designing the whole product system from a life cycle perspective. Understanding what this means and how to design this way is the first step – and Sustainable Minds Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software helps bridge this information gap. The software enables rapid iteration and comparison of new product concepts, and provides quantified environmental performance information during the design process to help make design and manufacturing trade-off decisions.

“It’s the optimal partnership to catalyze meaningful change,” stated Terry Swack, CEO and co-founder of Sustainable Minds. “Our mission is to bring environmental sustainability to mainstream product development and manufacturing in an accessible, empowering, and credible way. Designers have the opportunity and responsibility to change organizations and culture through the products we value and use. Our partnership with IDSA allows us to deliver our ecodesign and life cycle assessment software directly to this community, enabling them to develop new knowledge, skills, and competencies to integrate environmental sustainability into their standard product design processes. We are excited about our partnership with IDSA, and will be offering training and discounted subscriptions to all types of IDSA members – professionals, educators and students – to help make this happen.”

“At IDSA, our goal is to help prepare our members for the challenges that lie ahead, especially in the area of sustainability and ecodesign,” stated Clive Roux, executive director of IDSA. “We are excited to now have a more effective tool in place to help designers plan for sustainability and environmental impact assessment. Together, with Sustainable Minds, we can work to advance the understanding and practice of whole systems and life cycle thinking in product design processes. We look forward to working with Sustainable Minds to help us deliver greener product design education to our membership.”

Sustainable Minds’ life cycle impact assessment methodology contains a next generation dataset based originally on the Okala 2007 impact factors, a module in the Okala curriculum guide. The guide was developed under the auspices of IDSA, through financial support from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Design for the Environment Program, Eastman Chemical Company and the Whirlpool Corporation. Okala has proven to be a valuable resource used by design schools across the world, as well as individual design firms and corporations. For more information on the Okala curriculum guide, visit: http://idsa.org/whatsnew/sections/ecosection/index.html.

About IDSA
The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) is the world's oldest, largest, member-driven society for product design, industrial design, interaction design, human factors, ergonomics, design research, design management, universal design and related design fields. IDSA’s core purpose is to advance the profession of industrial design through education, information, community and advocacy. IDSA organizes the renowned International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) competition annually; hosts the International Design Conference and five regional conferences each year; and publishes Innovation, a quarterly on design, and designBytes, a weekly e-newsletter highlighting the latest headlines in the design world. IDSA's charitable arm, the Design Foundation, supports the dissemination of undergraduate scholarships annually to further industrial design education. The Society has an international presence with 27 local chapters in 27 different locations, providing opportunities to meet other designers, learn and get inspired. For more information, visit http://www.idsa.org.

About Sustainable Minds
Sustainable Minds, LLC is a greener product design software and information company dedicated to bringing environmentally sustainable product design into mainstream design and manufacturing in an understandable, empowering and credible way. The company has deep knowledge of product design, life cycle assessment and environmental systems design, Web-based business, software design and customer experience. Sustainable Minds is the first on-demand, early-stage design decision support software and information service that estimates a product’s potential life cycle environmental and human health impacts in a collaborative, learning work space. Customers include Yakima, Celestica, Whirlpool, Motorola, LUNAR, IDEO, Farm Design, Smart Design, Frog Design, MOTO Development Group, Pratt Institute and UCLA. In a Premium Strategic Relationship, Autodesk and Sustainable Minds are empowering companies to make more sustainable design decisions. With Inventor software for Digital Prototyping, Autodesk is helping take designers and engineers beyond 3D to address the most challenging environmental issues. More information about Sustainable Minds, founded in 2007 and headquartered in Cambridge Massachusetts, can be found at http://www.sustainableminds.com.

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News Facts

Sustainable Minds and IDSA partner to advance the adoption and integration of ecodesign and sustainability practices in product design.
Partnership brings together software and information to educate, inspire, and ensure that product development organizations have the knowledge, tools, and value systems in place to support greener product design practices.
Educate product designers on what is greener product design and what it means to design the whole product system from a life cycle perspective.