Service-Learning (SL) experiences enable University Social Responsibility (USR) to be worked on in engineering studies as a core of education for Sustainability. The combined use of such experiences with active student-centered teaching methodologies fosters the acquisition of general and specific competences. On the basis of students’ perception, this study investigated and sought evidence of empirical foundations to understand whether and how Project Based Learning (PBL) affects the acquisition of USR-related competences when SL experience was implemented as the regular exercise in core courses in engineering studies. This research studied 100 second year undergraduate students in Industrial Design Engineering and Product Development. The students were divided into two groups, one of which experienced Service-Learning only in one class activity while the other group carried out a PBL activity. A survey consisting of 28 items was delivered to all these students and their answers were analyzed from a descriptive statistics viewpoint to understand how the students perceived their degree of attainment of USR competences. The findings suggest a clear difference between the methodologies used, which shows that PBL methodology may lead to a greater acquisition of USR competences than SL activity.

One of the approaches followed by the circular economy (CE) to achieve sustainability through design is product life extension. Extending the life of products to make them useful for as long as possible is a means to reduce waste production and materials consumption, as well as the related impacts. For designers, conceptualizing products in a way that allows them to be used for longer is a challenge, and assessing how well they extend their lifespan can be helpful when it comes to choosing the best proposal. In this paper, 70 tools and methods related to eco‐design and circular economy are studied to determine how many of them consider parameters related to life extension and which can be applied in the early stages of design. The results of the analysis show that most of the existing tools and methods are applicable to developed products, and only a few of them take into account parameters related to extending the useful life. Of the 70 tools and methods, only 14 include some parameter related to life extension and are applicable to concepts. CE toolkit, Eco‐design PILOT, CE Designer, Circularity Assessment tool, Circularity Potential Indicator and Circular Design Tools take into consideration eight or more parameters to assess life extension in concepts. This will help designers select the most appropriate and will indicate the need for more complete tools to consider useful life extension in the early stages of design and thus enhance the selection of more sustainable products.

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to determine whether consumers accept new arguments for choosing a product that adapts to future needs. It is also seeking to investigate whether the design of products and their ensuing advertising and promotion through a sustainable approach by means of verbal narrative ads can generate a more positive emotional response in the future users of the product than with the application of visual narrative ads. Design/methodology/approach: To this end, an experiment was conducted consisting of consumers, with and without experience with the product, watching a promotional video based on verbal narrative, created using the new usage scenarios approach, in which the advantages of a sustainable product are shown. The neuronal response of the possible users was then measured by means of the electroencephalogram (EEG) headset. To be able to establish a comparison, the same response was also measured in the same consumers when they viewed a commercial video based on visual narrative about a product with similar characteristics. Findings: The results show, among other conclusions, that viewing the verbal narrative ad first triggers higher emotional values of excitement, both in the short and the long term, as well as frustration. It is also observed that having no experience with the product causes higher meditation values. Practical implications: This research pretends to discern the emotional effect of watching a green advertisement in the consumers. This can be useful to enterprises both to design their products to orientate them to consumer concerns, and to design the advertisements to emotionally link consumers with the product. Originality/value: This can be useful to enterprises both to design their products in such a way as to orientate them towards consumer concerns, and to design advertisements in such a way as to link consumers emotionally with the product.

One's thinking and reasoning style defines individual preferences when interacting and communicating with others. This work aims to analyse whether the thinking and reasoning style of the design teams exerts an influence on the degree of novelty of the design outcomes in two working environments: a face-to-face environment and a virtual environment. To address this, an experiment was set up in which 21 teams, each made up of 3 design students, were asked to obtain new solutions to 2 design problems, one of them in a face-to-face environment and the other in a virtual environment. The teams were defined according to their thinking and reasoning style, and the novelty of the design outcomes was measured with the SAPPhIRE model of causality. The results show that, overall, the degree of novelty is very similar in both environments, although it is a little higher in virtual environments. Teams with a rational style produce more novel results when using information and communication technologies than in a face-to-face environment. Teams with an interpersonal style, on the other hand, generate the least novel solutions when using technologies and produce the most novel solutions when they work in a face-to-face environment.