Green Product Development: Design for Sustainablility
MBA 290N / ME 290H / INFO 290
3 Units
Alice Agogino, Sara Beckman, Nathan Shedroff
Typically offered FALL semester
This is a core course of the MOT program
Course Objectives:
The focus of the course is management of innovation processes for sustainable products, from product definition to sustainable manufacturing and financial models. Using a project in which students will be asked to design and develop a product or service focused on sustainability, we will teach processes for collecting customer and user needs data, prioritizing that data, developing a product specification, sketching and building product prototypes, and interacting with the customer/community during product development. The course is intended as a very hands-on experience in the "green" product development process. The course will be a Management of Technology course offered jointly by the College of Engineering and the Haas School of Business. We aim to have half MBA students and half Engineering students (with a few other students, such as from the I-School) in the class. The instructors will facilitate students to form mixed disciplinary teams for the development of their "green" products. Students from the California College of the Arts (CCA) will also participate on the teams through a course taught separately at CCA. Students can expect to depart the semester understanding "green" product development processes as well as useful tools, techniques and organizational structures that support sustainable design and environmental management practice.
Course Website
We will make extensive use of the course Web site to both communicate information to you and to converse with you about your homework and your projects. You will find the course listed on bSpace at: http://bspace.berkeley.edu. Once you have formed your project groups, we will set up group web pages on which we expect you to store your working documents for your project. The faculty will review the group pages regularly to provide feedback on your work.
Topics Covered:
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES:
Sara L. Beckman has taught at the Haas School for over fifteen years in the areas of operations management, manufacturing strategy and product design and development. During that time she has won the Earl F. Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award three times and the campus Distinguished Teaching Award once. She has also worked at Hewlett-Packard where she was Director of the Product Generation Change Management Team, which modeled manufacturing strategy decisions and implemented team management structures in new product development, and in the Operations Management practice at Booz, Allen and Hamilton. She presently serves on the boards of the Corporate Design Foundation and the Building Materials Holding Corporation.
Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and affliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. She directs the Berkeley Expert Systems Technology (BEST) Laboratory, the Berkeley Instructional Technology Studio (BITS) and is working with Dean Newton to develop a Service Learning Media Lab and Design/Prototyping Studio in the new CITRIS building. She is currently Chair of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate, having served as Vice Chair during the 2004-05 academic year. She has served in a number of other administrative positions at UC Berkeley including Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. She also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and the (www.smete.org) digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology. She has supervised 65 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.
Nathan Shedroff: I've been an experience designer for over twelve years and have become an expert and leader in the fields of Information Architecture, Interaction Design, and Online and Interactive Media, with extensive, professional experience. I try to innovate in these fields as much I can and spend most of my time in the industries using multimedia and interactive technologies. I have worked in many different media and authored several books on multimedia, computers, and information. My electronic experience spans CD-ROM development, kiosk technology, applications development, online services, and the Internet. Lately, I have spent a lot of time building online solutions for businesses that enhance and evolve their online branding, developing new types of online advertising, and building customer-centered online experiences for companies seeking to expand their contact and services in this medium. I speak at conferences a lot, teach a few classes, and other industry functions. I am currently studying the viral nature of communication
Course Syllabus (pdf)
