Available through MCAD Online:
Sustainable Design Program

MCAD's Sustainable Design Program (mcad.edu/sustainable) is ground breaking sustainability education with a growing global reputation. The program was conceived, developed, and is led by working eco-design practitioners from the o2 International Network for Sustainable Design (o2.org), as well as other original content contributors active in defining sustainable design.

Picking up the trail already blazed in architecture, the Program is the first ever serving other design disciplines: product, packaging, print, interiors, community. Non-designers too, find a welcome home in the Program, learning how to find solutions far outside the box, with new paths for creative problem solving.

Elements of Sustainability
5-Week Workshop

This foundation course introduces participants to the various facets of sustainability and prepares designers, planners and decision-makers to apply sustainable thinking and pragmatic action to any endeavor, and explores sustainable systems-thinking tools to analyze and evaluate a world where economy and ecology go hand in hand.

Making the Business Case for Sustainability
15-Week Class

Gaining buy-in for any sustainability effort is one of the most pressing issues facing professionals today. From designers trying to get their clients to accept new ideas, to businesses trying to get investors to partner in their vision, not understanding the basics of gaining buy-in dooms even the brightest of efforts to failure before it even gets off the ground. This fresh look at business and design reveals the unspoken interplay between producers and consumers, governments and people, stockholders and stakeholders, man and the environment, and how all of these things interconnect. Understanding these connections allows those “in the know” to move ahead of their competition and position themselves as forward-thinking market leaders, helping to drive real and positive change.

Ethics Based Marketing
5-Week Workshop

People today are looking for products or services that not only whiten and brighten, but deliver an intangible extra. That extra is ethical values. From production methods, business practices and stakeholder relationships to corporate giving and vendor associations, people are paying attention to WHO serves their needs as much as WHAT they are selling. This class looks at these connections, opportunities for applying (or avoiding) marketing levers based on corporate values, and how to establish — and profit from — healthy, long-term, stakeholder relationships.

Greener Packaging: Quick Tips and Profitable Solutions
5-Week Workshop

A crash-course for anyone interested in creating better packaging. In this intense five-Week journey, we'll dissect successes, catastrophic failures, and explore avenues to help create sustainable, highly effective — and profitable — solutions. In an ever globalizing market, this is the essential MUST do. Conducted through a series of “secret shopper” exercises, students are encouraged to bring in their own real packaging challenges to explore.

Packaging Design and Market Greening
15-Week Class

We handle packages every day. They're the backbone of modern commerce. They account for a full third of our waste stream. Yet with all that is riding on their tiny shoulders, little real attention is given to them. It's little wonder the shelves are brimming over with bad packaging, our world is drowning in a sea of garbage and more than 70 percent of all new products fail. This course is an essential look at packaging few schools offer: from material selection to environmental impact to consumer perception and market triggers. By the course's conclusion, students will be able to look at a packaging problem objectively and be on track to maximize a product's appeal while minimizing eco-impact — generating truly innovative design.

Available for your online program:
Open Courseware

Open Courseware by Wendy Jedlicka, is a series of fully developed classes ready to run through your school's online program. These classes can be tailored for either undergraduate, continuing education, or graduate level students. Call for details.

Cause-Based Marketing

This course examines Cause-Based Marketing techniques to promote ethics-based companies, and as a tool to move mainstream companies into the green marketing arena. Building week to week, the students will create a simple cause-based marketing campaign to help support a local charity, business, or effort.

Brand-Management in an Ever-greening Market

An eco brand-management primer for brand-managers, entrepreneurs, and the creative service people who serve them. This course is designed as a compliment to sustainable product and packaging design-focus classes, as well as Marketing and Business classes.

Eco-entrepreneurship

Here we examine how eco-businesses are making their way into the mainstream, as well as look at how niche players have carved out healthy and stable market share. Students will further develop their own, or a client’s, business using proven tactics by pioneering eco-companies. In addition the class will look at ways of using eco-entrepreneurship ideas to leverage positive things a company may already be doing but not taking full advantage of — better positioning for today, while strategically planning for tomorrow.

Introduction to Environmentally Preferred Purchasing and Supply Chain Management

This is a quick introduction to Environmentally Preferred (and Socially Responsible) Purchasing (EPP) and Supply Chain Management, one of the first operational steps in moving a mainstream company to a more sustainable business model, and THE core essential for the operations side of an ethics-based company.

Walking the Talk 2.0: Ethics, Marketing, Sustainability and Design

Going way beyond looking green, this is a deeper, business and design focused look at creating not only meaningful messages and products, but ways of using core values as a way to strengthen a company’s brand, as well as foster a more cohesive, and far-looking business operating system. The essential how-to for walking, and living, your talk.

Introduction to Sustainable Design and Business: Educators' Professional Development Edition
15-Week Class (Online)

The educators inside look at how to teach: A hands-on, holistic approach to sustainable design and business. The critical, and actionable, first steps to move the whole of a company or effort to a more sustainable operating model.

Undergraduate Classes

Introduction to Sustainable Design and Development
Department of Art and Design
University of Wisconsin-Stout, Menomonie, WI
15-Week Class (Online)

Examination of theory and practice of sustainable development and the influential role of design.

Introduction to Sustainable Design and Business
Open Courseware
15-Week Class

A hands-on, holistic approach to sustainable design and business. The critical, and actionable, first steps to move the whole of a company or effort to a more sustainable operating model.

Resources for Higher Education

Hiring for Sustainability

Open Courseware