Sustainable Product-Service System Design applied to Distributed Renewable Energy fostering the goal of sustainable energy for all

Energy is a fundamental imperative to the quest for sustainable development. The current challenge is to provide sustainable energy solutions for all, while concomitantly increasing the access to energy and improving usage efficiency. Within this perspective, education in design in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) must increasingly equip design students with a broad knowledge base, as well as effective methods and tools so that new generations of designers (and design educators) can play more effective roles in the development and diffusion of sustainable energy systems. This is the ambition of the Learning Network on Sustainable Energy Systems (LeNSes) project – an African-European multi-polar network for curricula development on Sustainable Product-Service System (S.PSS) design applied to Distributed Renewable Energy (DRE). The research hypothesis of the LeNSes project is that S.PSS can be effectively applied to DRE, representing a promising opportunity to obtain synergies among the economic, environmental, and socio-ethical dimensions.