Engineering Design and Sustainability

Every new product, service or system that we design to serve our needs impact in one way or another on people’s lives, the health and wealth of our societies, and the planet. Yet we tend to design new products without thinking how to positively impact the larger systems at play. Consequently we end up with many by-products that negatively affect us. The extent to which this occurs depends primarily on the intentions and the decisions of designers, and manufacturers.

In the Engineering Design and Sustainability group, we use systems thinking, engineering design and human-centred approaches and techniques to understand how to design systems to address issues such as circularity, sustainability and resource-centric design.

These activities focus on a wide range of product life cycle stages including material extraction, manufacturing, distribution, consumption and collection and recovery. We have worked on sectors including mining, consumer goods, construction, aerospace and waste management in partnership with small and medium enterprises, large corporations and government organisations. 

Research

'Water Treatment Plants as Resource Hubs' funded by Vinnova and the Ragn-Sells Group

'Design for Circular Consumption in the Home Environment' funded by RAEng and P&G

'Circular Behaviour and Product Service Systems' funded by EPSRC and P&G

'Closing the Loops of Fast Moving Consumer Goods' funded by EPSRC and P&G

'Holistic integration of technology, design and policy for a greener plastic future' funded by EPSRC

Methods and tools

Flow Mapper: The Flow Mapper is a tool that can be used to model systems that produce closed-loop resource flows. The model provides stakeholders with a holistic view of systems. This view enables companies to make informed decisions for products and systems for the circular economy.

Publications

Publication list