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Great News for Aspiring Green Product Designers

Great News for Aspiring Green Product Designers

Published 06-20-03

Submitted by J. Ottman Consulting, Inc.

NEW YORK, NY - The U.S. EPA has just awarded the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), The Design Foundation a $50,000 grant to develop and host Eco-Design education workshops across the country in the coming year. The award represents an Innovation Grant‹a special program designed to spur imaginative alternatives to regulatory approaches.

Jacquelyn Ottman of J. Ottman Consulting and Philip White of Orb Analysis for Design will plan and conduct the workshops. The workshops will be built around the "Business-Ecodesign Tools," a copy of which is available at the Eco-Responsibility section page at http://www.IDSA.org. The project will also include posting a copy of the workshop guide on the IDSA website and publishing an article on the topic in IDSA¹s Innovation magazine.

Early plans call to conduct the workshops in New York, Minneapolis or Chicago, and San Francisco, in conjunction with host design schools, local chapters of O2 and IDSA.

Sponsorship opportunities are available.

This project will serve a critical need to jumpstart eco-design education among professionals and students in the U.S., and thus help to maintain competitiveness with the other countries. It will also help prepare U.S. manufacturers for upcoming ISO 14000 product-related standards, extended producer responsibility and other policy initiatives in the global marketplace. Considering that an estimated 75% of the environmental impact of a product is determined at the design stage, this grant emphasizes the significant potential environmental role of industrial designers.

Jacquelyn Ottman is an internationally recognized consultant in the areas of green marketing and eco-innovation. She is the author of Green Marketing: Opportunity for Innovation (McGraw Hill 1998), and a former co-chair of the NYC chapter of O2, the global network of professionals interested in green design.

Philip White is a practicing eco-designer and the current chairman of the Eco-responsibility section of IDSA. IDSA, with 3000 members, is the largest organization of professional industrial designers in the U.S.

For more information about this eco-design education workshop, please refer to the EPA press release (in pdf format): www.epa.gov/oswer/docs/iwg/IndustrialDesignfinal.pdf .

or contact:
Jacquelyn Ottman, J. Ottman Consulting: info@greenmarketing.com
Philip White, Orb Analysis for Design: philip@orb-design.com
Celia Weinstein, IDSA Design Foundation: celiaw@idsa.org

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J. Ottman Consulting, Inc.

J. Ottman Consulting, Inc.

J. Ottman Consulting, Inc., is a marketing consulting and new products firm with the mission of helping businesses, government agencies, and not-for-profit groups meet consumer needs more sustainably.

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