As a part of my personal development plan and out of pure interest and passion I decided to add another big topic to my learning plan. The question was, how I – as one person, designer and engineer – could have the most impact on working against climate change and for protecting the environment.
Of course there is always my personal approach of how to live life sustainably. Less of everything is a good start. Less meat, less (or different) mobility, less (and different) consumption.
But in what area could I have an even bigger impact? Of course in the huge area of product development. Here you can always try to do your best to inform your working environment about the options they might have and you can inspire people to open up for a new way of thinking. The access to products developed now for the future gives the best opportunities to truly make them more sustainable and minimize the carbon footprint.
To have real good arguments and to show the opportunities also for the business side, I did 2 large online courses at the TU Delft:
“Circular Economy – an Introduction” to deepen the basis knowledge of what kinds of Circular economies there are and how the processes could be implemented.
“Engineering Design for a Circular Economy” went much deeper into the stages of the development process and showed – on excellent examples – how a circular approach could even help businesses to be more successful while saving resources and gaining a closer relationship to customers and users.
