PicoNext has joined forces with King's College London to introduce Digital Product Passports into the engineering curriculum, focusing on sustainability education.
King's College London, ranked among the leading global universities, is collaborating with PicoNext and Dr Francesco Ciriello, Senior Lecturer in Engineering Education, to reformulate the teaching of environmental product-level sustainability. This initiative involves integrating Digital Product Passports (DPPs) into a new course, positioned within the Department of Engineering.
The course, titled Computational Design for Manufacturing, immerses students in eco-design practices through a hands-on Design for Sustainability workshop. The workshop is tailored to impart understanding about creating and communicating sustainable product attributes using DPPs. Under the guidance of Dr Ciriello, students are also educated on the importance of sustainability and compliance with European regulations.
Students enrolled in the course engage with engineering principles through various pedagogical methods, including brainstorming sessions and iterative design processes. They access state-of-the-art lab facilities at King's and employ gamification techniques to enhance their learning outcomes. By utilising a coloured card deck, students distill key concepts from the European Union's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), aligning closely with the legislation's demands on Digital Product Passports.
As students work through the curriculum, they focus on creating DPPs to convey the product details developed during their course. They employ the PicoNext AI Assistant to handle raw data and personal notes related to their designs. The AI facilitates the generation of summary data, which students can subsequently edit and publish in the PicoNext DPP Planner as part of their final coursework.
"Preparing world-class students for the rigours of real-world engineering, so they can make a difference from day-one, is an important part of the educational programme here at King's. By integrating technology that helps embed tenets of sustainable design and compliance, collaborating with PicoNext helps us make our students better engineers who can be agile in a shifting legislative landscape," stated Dr Francesco Ciriello.
Dr Ciriello further explained, "Creating Digital Product Passports is an important way to communicate and critique its return-on-investment (ROI), and we wanted our students to be well-versed in best practices to do so – especially as new regulations roll out over the next months and years. Using generative AI in PicoNext, we could leverage a small quantity of product attributes in a data lakehouse to create an attractive DPP customer-facing landing page, in no time at all."
Dave Dickson, founder of PicoNext, shared his perspective: "With our collaboration with Dr Ciriello and the students at King's College London, we're excited to lead the way in integrating Digital Product Passports into engineering education. By harnessing the power of generative AI, PicoNext empowers the next generation of engineers to not only understand the importance of sustainability but also to implement it in product design decisions. This initiative is essential to prepare students to tackle the growing demands of sustainability and regulatory compliance in a fast-changing market."
