Sustainable Design Engineering

The department of Sustainable Design Engineering (SDE) conducts research at the intersection of engineering and sustainability to transform design and unlock novel design opportunities for addressing societal challenges.

Advancements in computational technology, materials, and fabrication technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for products, services, and system design while creating new societal and environmental challenges. These new transformative technologies do not simply serve as marginal improvements on existing products; instead, they entail radical changes in how we design, engineer, use, experience, and recover products. We strongly believe that a creative and responsible application of emerging technologies to everyday products, services, and systems requires strong couplings of theory and practice from design, engineering, and sustainability.

Within the faculty, the SDE department is closely involved in education in the Bachelor's degree programme, in particular in the technology subjects. The department is also responsible for the the Integrated Product Design (IPD) Master's programme. Our goal is to train a new generation of designers who create impact with and through deep knowledge of such emerging technologies in a sustainable, measurable, and scalable way.

Our Mission

The research mission of the SDE department is to develop theories and methods for the design of sustainable products, services, and systems that have a positive impact on people, society, and the planet, based on responsible use of emerging data, material, and fabrication technologies. We contribute to societal transitions through technology-driven interventions grounded in engineering and design research techniques. Our research builds on strong prototyping competence, supported by analytical and computational modeling techniques, and validated through rich quantitative and qualitative evaluation approaches.

Research Sections

Our department is comprised of three sections. While computation, materials, and sustainability are common themes characterising and driving our research, each section has its own research emphasis.

Design for Sustainability

Knowledge and Intelligence Design (KInD)

Materializing Futures

Labs

Our research labs serve as a platform for cross-disciplinary experimentation and collaboration and a meeting place where researchers co-create and collaborate in designing, developing, and testing research artefacts.