MAPD4100 Sustainable Design Approaches Emneplan

Sustainable Design Approaches is an introduction to the ecological, social and economic challenges the global society is facing today, and how designers may contribute to sustainable industrial production and everyday life styles through new design solution. The course gives an overview of the scientific sustainability principles as well as the political common global goals (Paris agreement and UN's Sustainability development goals) and how they may be implemented in the design process. You will train your design methodology in finding focus, needs and problem definition related to chosen tasks and user groups, as well as exploring a set of design strategies in idea generation and design of final solution. Finally you are also introduced to methods for evaluation of products and services in order to discuss their contribution to a sustainable development in a systemic perspective.

Admission to the Master's programme.

After completing the course, the student is expected to have an overview and understanding of the most important environmental challenges the world is facing today and how design can contribute to solving them. Working on this complex topic, knowledge, skills and general competence on advanced level is needed.

Knowledge

The student

• understands how products can be interconnected in systems and mutually affecting each other
• has a good understanding of how to use information about the environmental impact of the product system, to make informed decisions about how the product system should be designed to minimize this impact
• understands the concept of a circular economy and how design can contribute to achieving this
• has knowledge about how the behaviour of the user may affect the environmental impact caused by the product, and how the design may affect this behaviour
• has knowledge about the global challenges of production and consumption as well as how design may contribute to a sustainable development and the UN sustainability goals.

Skills

The student

• can take a systems perspective to describe a chosen topic in relation to the sustainability challenges
• identify needs on a basic level and related user groups
• identify the main environmental impacts caused by a product system throughout its lifecycle and make rough estimates of these impacts
• can justify the choice of sustainable design strategy/strategies to be implemented in the project’s ideation phase, design process & results
• can make design decisions to enable for additional lifecycles in a circular economy
• can analyse and compare (socio-ecological) sustainability performance of product concepts in order to identify areas for improvement and select winning concepts
• can use sustainability analysis results to justify in what ways the suggested offering is more sustainable than the current solution, and to identify areas needing further improvement

General competence

The student

• understands the importance of considering sustainability aspects in a design process, and can identify and apply appropriate tools or methods to minimize or eliminate the negative environmental impact
• is able to communicate the design process, use of design strategies and tools, as well as evaluations and decisions made to reach the most promising results for sustainability
• is able to reflect on the consequences of values and strategies chosen by the designer and company in a systemic perspective.

A real artificial intelligence project will be carried by a large team of students. A practical application will be targeted using state-of-the-art methods and tools. The students will construct a working system from scratch, implementing machine learning components as well as using existing tools. The students are involved in the entire process, starting from earlier design choices to the AI system completion. Examples of tasks may include speech processing and image recognition, robots or drones navigation, self-driving vehicles, chatbots, etc.

Through this course, the students will gain an in-depth understanding of "AI in practice", as opposed to "AI in theory" or "AI on toy problems".

No formal requirements over and above the admission requirements.

Upon successful completion of the course:

Knowledge

• Students will gain valuable insights into why, when and how to use AI methods in realistic problems that they may encounter in their technical careers, as well as the necessary expertise to produce necessary documentation and project management.

Skills

• The students learn to work in a large group with a vaguely defined problem statement.
• The students learn to assess different frameworks and tools for artificial intelligence in given contexts.
• The students will build systems that realises aspects of intelligent behaviour.
• The students will gain hands-on experience designing and implementing a relatively large AI project.
• The students learn debugging their applications and bug correction at a system level (integration).

General competence

• The students learn to work in a project within their specific expertise. This includes making decisions based on limited information, tolerating these decisions when they turn out to be suboptimal and evaluating them when better information becomes available.

The project work will be carried out in groups of a size suited for the assignment and focused around the relevant laboratories at OsloMet. The groups are relatively large, with 5-20 students.

The following required coursework must be approved before the student can take the exam:

• Minimum 80% attendance in workshops
• A final group (5-20 students) presentation.

Project report (between 10000 and 25000 words) (100%)

The exam grade can be appealed.

New/postponed exam

In case of failed exam or legal absence, the student may apply for a new or postponed exam. New or postponed exams are offered within a reasonable time span following the regular exam. The student is responsible for applying for a new/postponed exam within the time limits set by OsloMet. The Regulations for new or postponed examinations are available in Regulations relating to studies and examinations at OsloMet.