The Lemelson Center for Design has from it’s inception been a laboratory for alternative transportation.  Students often learn metal working to engage in design and modification of human powered vehicles, first from a recreational perspective and later from a green technology perspective. This has been a natural progression and has led students and faculty to explore additional alternatives to energy needs and concerns. Students have explored enterprise creation in this area, systems for conservation of resources, human powered transportation, and ecological fieldwork.

Sustainability: Sustainability is a characteristic of a process or state that can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely. The term, in its environmental usage, refers to the potential longevity of vital human ecological support systems, such as the planet's climatic system, systems of agriculture, industry, forestry, and fisheries, and human communities in general and the various systems on which they depend.

Energy Development: Future energy development, providing for the world's future energy needs, currently faces great challenges. These include an increasing world population, demands for higher standards of living, a need for less pollution, a need to avert global warming, and a possible end to fossil fuels. Energy development is the ongoing effort to provide sustainable energy resources through knowledge, skills, and constructions. When harnessing energy from primary energy sources and converting them into more convenient secondary energy forms, such as electrical energy and cleaner fuel, both emissions (reducing pollution) and quality (more efficient use) are important.

Green Technology: Environmental technology "green technology" or clean technology (also abbreviated as CleanTech) is the application of the environmental sciences to conserve the natural environment and resources, and by curbing the negative impacts of human involvement. Sustainable development is the core of environmental technologies. When applying sustainable development as a solution for environmental issues, the solutions need to be socially equitable, economically viable, and environmentally sound. Green anarchists, criticise the concept due to their view of technology requiring the exploitation of the environment, thus making the idea contradictory.
Some environmental technologies that retain sustainable development are: recycling, water purification, sewage treatment, remediation, flue gas treatment, solid waste management, renewable energy, and others.

STUDENT PROJECTS

•    Custom Bike Frames
•    SegStable
•    Gemini Tandem
•    RunAbout Cycles
•    Bicycle Ambulances
•    Photobireactor
•    Pedal Powered Grain Grinder

INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITIES

International activities during the grant period included engagement in productive collaborative relationships, and also “international” events and projects such as the following:

•    A special six-week exhibit at the United Nations that included several original pieces of innovative technology equipment designed and fabrication by LATDC students, a LATDC photographic exhibit of “log book “ inventions, a looping DVD video about the LATDC program and its work, and distribution of LATDC brochures

•    An international design summit that brought together engineers, designers, and appropriate technology practitioners from the U.S. and abroad to generate solutions to technology problems faced by wheelchair users globally

•    Support of student and alumni work in Nicaragua and Vietnam including a long-term collaboration with an international wheelchair NGO; support of student research on assistive technology in Kenya; support of alumni work in agriculture and development in Guatemala; and support of alumni work developing new technology applications including establishment of a bicycle ambulance building facility in Windhoek, Namibia, in southwestern Africa

•    A long-range relationship with Whirlwind Wheelchair International, a global non-profit organization that has reached over 15,000 people in less developed countries with appropriately designed wheelchairs and has created new jobs for many people in these areas

•    Hosting of a one-day conference titled “Developing Solutions, Developing Nations” at which representatives from worldwide organizations discussed the state of critical technologies for people with disabilities in less developed nations

•    Development and redevelopment of a regularly taught LATDC course titled “Appropriate Design in the Developing World,” which has included collaborations with people on a variety of projects for various less developed countries.