ENGAGING STUDENTS IN THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY WITH PRODUCTIVE FAILURE

Design for the Circular Economy often emphasizes business models and future visions, with less focus on practical application. Sustainability courses are generally seen as complex, poorly attended, and minimally integrated into design projects. In 2022, a new course on Repair was introduced. This course aligns with repair and also with other R strategies like refurbishing, remanufacturing, and recycling. To engage students, the productive failure pedagogy was implemented in eight weekly workshops (3EC, one quarter). This method starts with an unsolvable exploratory problem, motivating students to learn the necessary knowledge. Workshops cover product architecture, disassembly documentation, part prioritization, legislation, directives, and human factors in repair design. The course, a master elective, has seen 25 to 50 students per run, working on client-based products to demonstrate improved circular economy fit. This is the second IDE curriculum course using productive failure. Student evaluations (20 respondents) rated the course highly, with an overall grade of 8.5 out of 10 and a teaching, coaching, and feedback score of 4.68 out of 5. Students were highly engaged in making the circular economy actionable. The paper will present the course, student outcomes, and learning experiences, focusing on the experiential learning aspect and the effects of productive failure on engineering courses.