Dit vak wordt alleen in het Engels aangeboden.
Admission requirements
This course is part of the Bachelor Honours Programme Sustainability (Leiden-Delft-Erasmus) and is therefore only open to students that are enrolled in this programme. Students take both courses of the programme (Fundamentals and Challenge) in the same academic year.
Topics
Sustainability
Design thinking
Topic will vary widely depending on the specific regional challenges groups choose and may be related to the urban environment, circular propositions as part of the circular economy.
Disciplines
Sustainability, environmental science, economics, policy science, urban studies, sociologym, systemic design.
Skills
- Researching
- Analysing
- Generating Solutions
- Project-based working
- Collaborating
- Oral communication
- Written communication
- Presenting
- Societal awareness
- Reflecting
- Resilience
Number of students
Minimum of 45 and maximum 50.
Description
In this challenge, you will work in a small, interdisciplinary team of students (4-5) on real-life societal sustainability challenges. These challenges will address problems faced by regional stakeholders from across public, private or civic spheres.
An example of such a challenge could be to develop solutions to the housing crisis that simultaneously help cities in meeting their climate goals. Another example could be investigating policies to make sustainable technologies such as renewables or electric vehicles available to a broad spectrum of society. A final example could be to create a development plan with one business or a range of businesses to make their supply chain practices more circular.
You will learn to use a design-oriented approach for investigating and addressing systemic problems. This approach will help you develop novel solutions to challenges across different disciplines.
A good outcome would be a clear iterative improvement in addressing the challenge whereby groups continually develop their understanding of the problem (from different scientific perspectives including the disciplines above) and challenge themselves to broaden the solution space. In terms of outputs a good result would be the provision of new approaches and prototypes of solutions to stakeholders in addressing the problems they face.
Course objectives
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
Work effectively in an interdisciplinary team of students.
Analyse a real-world problem from multiple perspectives.
Work in a professional manner with an external organization (challenge owner).
Identify relevant design methods and techniques from those introduced in the Fundamentals course and apply these in a concrete challenge.
Combine insights from different disciplines to substantiate designs of solutions.
Present research and solutions effectively, both in oral and written form.
Programme and timetable
Meetings will be organized on Tuesdays, will begin at 19:00 and run for 2 hours. The programme will include meetings of the following types:
face to face coordination meetings with the rest of your group,
group supervision meetings with course instructors,
progress meetings presenting and giving feedback to other groups,
Meetings with regional stakeholders at a frequency depending on availability and the specific challenge
Enrichment sessions on sustainability with invited guest speakers
Dates - Tuesdays 19:00 - 21:00 (Locations will alternate between 3 locations (Leiden (The Hague), Delft & Erasmus)), so be prepared to travel for sessions):
11-Feb | (Rotterdam) Kick-off to Challenges course
25-Feb | (tbd) Enrichment workshop session
11-Mar | (tbd) Enrichment workshop session
18-Mar | (The Hague) Carousel - peer feedback session
25-Mar | Independent work session
01-Apr | Independent work session
08-Apr | (tbd) Presentations problem definition
15-Apr | (Delft) Preparation for design phase - pressure cooker
22-Apr | (tbd) Enrichment workshop session
29-Apr | Independent work session
06-May | (tbd) Enrichment workshop session
13-May | Independent work session
20-May | (The Hague) Carousel - peer feedback session
27-May | Independent work session
03-Jun | (tbd) Enrichment workshop session
10-Jun | (tbd) Enrichment workshop session
17-Jun | Independent work session
24-Jun | (Leiden) Final presentations & drinks
01-Jul | (Online) Hand in report
Reading list
Readings will be directed in relation to the challenges undertaken and literature will be announced in class or via Brightspace.
Course load and teaching method
This course is worth 10 ECTS, which means the total course load equals 280 hours:
Meetings divided over 20 weeks of = 2 hours weekly (participation is mandatory)
Practical work: 10 hours/week
- including 8 hours meeting stakeholders or regions over the entire period),
- including the Challenge specific reading: 4 hours/week.
Final problem report: 40 hours
Assessment methods
The assessment methods is pass/fail, based on the following:
Participation assessed continually through participation in seminars
Initial design brief (assignment #3; deadline Februari 16th 2024)
Literature review (assignment #4; deadline March 15th 2024)
Presentation of the final product (June 25th 2024)
Final group report of the product of 6000-7000 words (deadline July 2nd 2024) • activities included in the final report could include activities such as apps, blogs, vlogs, visualisations or other type of design etc.
Students could only pass this course after successful completion of all partial assignments.
Brightspace
The Brightspace environment of Leiden University will be used in this course. Students will be enrolled to the Brightspace module by the organisation of the course.
Registration process
Enrolling in this course is possible from 2 September (9:00 hrs) until 6 October (22:00 hrs), through the Honours Academy of Leiden University. The registration link will be posted on the student website of the Honours Academy of Leiden University.
Please note: students are not required to register through uSis for this course. Your registration will be done centrally.
Contact
Programme coordinator: Esther van der Ent, LDEHonoursSustainability@cml.leidenuniv.nl.