Sustainable Product Design for Engineers

Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati via Coursera Specialization

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Overview

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This three-course specialization equips engineers to integrate creative, user-centred design thinking with quantitative sustainability tools across the entire product development process. Learners progress from the fundamentals of product design — user research, ideation, prototyping, and product aesthetics — through advanced embodiment design, Design for X, universal design principles, and interaction design, to a dedicated course on sustainable product design covering Life Cycle Assessment (classical and fast-track), sustainable material selection, design for disassembly and recycling, circular economy and product-service systems, and eco-labels and regulatory compliance (RoHS, REACH, WEEE). Taught by faculty of the Department of Design at IIT Guwahati and grounded in industry case studies, AI role-play simulations, and hands-on projects, the specialization prepares learners to take a product from user need to a validated, environmentally responsible design.

Syllabus

Course 1: Introduction to Product Design
Course 2: Advanced Product Design
Course 3: Sustainable Product Design

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By the end of this course, you will be able to transform an approved product concept into a manufacturable, reliable, and usable design. You will decompose product functions, generate and select concepts using morphological charts and Pugh matrices, anticipate failures with FMEA, and verify fit through tolerance analysis. You will then optimize your design for assembly, reliability, cost, quality, and safety using Design for X methods; apply cognitive principles such as affordances, Fitts' law, and Hick's law; and craft interactions across touch, voice, and physical controls — evaluating them with heuristic evaluation and A/B testing. What makes this course unique is its insistence on measurable design: every principle comes with quantitative targets — assembly efficiency, risk priority numbers, response-time thresholds, target sizes — so your decisions are defensible, not intuitive. A single running case study, a portable water purifier for rural communities, carries every method from function structure to field validation, alongside cases spanning medical devices, appliances, and consumer electronics. Whether you are an engineer moving toward design or a designer strengthening engineering rigor, you will finish with a complete, integrated toolchain for taking products from concept to user-ready reality.
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By the end of this course, you will be able to take a product from a real user need to a tested, working prototype using a structured, user-centred design process. You will learn to conduct user research with both qualitative and quantitative methods, build personas and journey maps, and turn your findings into clear design requirements. A rich toolkit of ideation techniques — brainstorming, SCAMPER, brainwriting, and morphological methods — will help you generate, evaluate, and refine novel concepts systematically. You will then bring your ideas to life through paper, digital, and physical prototypes, and use iterative testing to improve them quickly. What makes this course unique is its blend of engineering rigour and design thinking. You will master not only how a product functions, but also the principles of form, aesthetics, colour, and emotional design that set market-leading products apart. Developed by faculty at IIT Guwahati, every module pairs foundational theory with industry case studies, preparing you to bridge the gap between engineering analysis and human-centred innovation.
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By the end of this course, you will be able to evaluate products across the triple bottom line, conduct life cycle assessments (LCA) to quantify environmental impact, apply circular economy strategies to products and business models, and navigate certifications, regulations, and credible sustainability communication. You will progress from planetary boundaries, SDGs, and eco-design strategies to hands-on classical and fast-track LCA, impact assessment, and sensitivity analysis. You will then design for disassembly, recycling, remanufacturing, and product-service systems, before mastering eco-labels, RoHS/REACH/WEEE compliance, carbon accounting, and greenwashing-proof claims. Uniquely, every design decision in this course is grounded in measurable life cycle data, not assumptions. Real cases — a PET bottle redesign, glass vs. aluminium packaging, Fairphone's circular electronics, and an EU Ecolabel journey — show how theory becomes industry practice. Designed for engineers, product managers, and sustainability professionals, the course equips you with a practical toolkit to create products that are environmentally sound, commercially viable, and ready for global markets.