Hello, my name is Bram Wendel a motivated Dutch student in the Master

program of Industrial Ecology at TU Delft and Leiden. I’ve chosen this master because I want to help to take part in solving today’s environmental challenges and learn something about climate change, instead of the basic superficial approach the most of us talk about. Therefore, my ambition is to learn more about sustainability, climate change, lifecycles, ecosystems, and implementing research, new systems to improve our way of managing and designing our environment.

During this master program, I found out that eco-design is a tiny part of sustainability. In this
master program, you learn how the bigger picture is even more crucial, which means controlling the lifecycle of the product, how the product socially performed, and the impacts on the climate. Researching these aspects improves the design among the right supply chain that reduces the impact.

Every day we come closer to the point that everybody feels and believes that climate change is a crucial point that is massively influenced by our behavior. Everybody can reduce their impacts stepwise, also designers. Instead of making attractive products with life-lasting impacts, make beautiful product/service systems which improve the earth as a whole.

I got inspired by sustainability during my bachelor in design and wanted to learn more about it. I have read books, which eventually resulted in studying Industrial Ecology. However, this study is not focusing on design but more on research. That could be seen as interesting, because what I miss in my designs, is to generate new ground-breaking innovations and inform the public as results of research, instead of only implementing what others found.

My bachelor of industrial design taught me just a little bit about sustainability. Mainly the master program of Industrial Ecology helped me to see how sustainability includes engineering, social and ecological aspects. In this study, we research and understand the impact products and systems have and how a possible solution emerges.

Discover what you could do to reduce the impact or evenly get a positive impact on the environment. There are several easy steps for your personal life, like enjoying plant-based foods instead of meats and don’t use unnecessary the car or airplane. Also, it is very exciting to read books about sustainable design to implement those in a circular economy (e.g. Cradle-to-Cradle, Products that last, Innovation by nature and System Design). Also study Industrial Ecology, because during this program you will learn even more about sustainability!

A student of Industrial Ecology told me about LUGO, interesting. I enjoyed to tell you my story, thank you!