Autodesk announced the availability of new educational content focused on design for product life through the Autodesk Sustainability Workshop.
The Sustainability Workshop is an online resource demonstrating the principles of sustainable design using Digital Prototyping.
With the Sustainability Workshop, Autodesk is changing the way students learn, giving them easy access to free digital content that can supplement traditional engineering education.
Most electronics are designed with many parts, often containing toxic materials or heavy metals.
Such materials can pollute the environment while taking thousands of years to break down.
Since as much as 80 percent of a product's environmental impact is determined during the design phase, sustainable design principles must be considered from the beginning.
Designing sustainably means getting the most use out of the materials and energy that go into a product, by extending its useful life or making it easier to recycle.
The new videos, case studies and tutorials on Sustainability Workshop provide tips and strategies for designing products for durability, disassembly, repair, and upgrade using real-world examples, such as the Stanford Bloom laptop project.
"Sustainable design is still largely missing from most design and engineering programs," said Dawn Danby, sustainable design program manager at Autodesk.
"With the Sustainability Workshop, we give students easy access to resources they can use to teach themselves about sustainability in engineering.
Specifically, the new content on Design for Product Life shows students how to choose the most appropriate sustainable design strategies and apply them to projects."