Design for sustainability

This MIT OpenCourseWare offers selected lecture notes, details of projects and examples, assignments, images on Flickr and a reading list taken from the Design for Sustainability graduate course taught in the autumn of 2006.

The course considers the growing popularity of sustainability and its implications for the practice of engineering, particularly for the built environment. Two particular methodologies are featured: life cycle assessment (LCA) and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). The LCA methodology is a rigorous, quantitative approach to environmental impact evaluation that tallies the impacts of products throughout their lifetimes; it has been used successfully in a number of industries (particularly packaging and manufacturing) but less frequently in the built environment. The LEED rating system awards points to projects for achieving specific goals considered relevant to sustainable design, and rates built projects according to the total number of points achieved. The fundamentals of each approach will be presented. Specific topics covered include water and wastewater management, energy use, material selection, and construction.

[Description and screenshot taken from MIT OCW page for this course. (c) MIT used under the terms of their CC-NC-SA license.]

Link: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/civil-and-environmental-engineering/1-964-design-for-sustainability-fall-2006/index.htm
Author: Eric Adams; Jerome Connor; John Ochsendorf; Rossella Nicolin
Publication Date: 2006-12
Source: http://ocw.mit.edu/
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
Rights: Copyright MIT. Use subject to a Creative Commons non-commercial share-alike License and other terms of use. For full details see http://ocw.mit.edu/terms/