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 challenges groups choose. Topics include but are not limited to the urban environment, sustainable business models, and circular propositions as part of the circular economy.
Disciplines
Sustainability, environmental science, economics, policy science, urban studies, sociology, systemic design climate governance.
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.
In their projects, students will continually develop their understanding of the problem at hand, using different scientific perspectives including the disciplines above, to achieve a clear iterative improvement in addressing the challenge. Ultimately, the output is the provision of new approaches and prototypes of solutions to help stakeholders address 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):
17 February - Kick-off to Challenges course
24 February – Workshop project management
3 March - Enrichment workshop session
10 March – Carousel – peer feedback session
17 March – Enrichment workshop session
24 March – Enrichment workshop session
31 March - Independent work session
7 April - Presentations problem definition
14 April - Preparation for design phase - pressure cooker
21 April - Enrichment workshop session
28 April– Enrichment workshop session
12 May – Enrichment workshop session
19 May - Carousel - peer feedback session
26 May - Enrichment workshop session
02 June – Independent work session
9 June – Independent work session
16 June - Independent work session
24 June Final presentations & drinks
01 July Hand in report (online)
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
Literature review
Presentation of the final product
Final group report of the product of 6000-7000 words
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 group 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 1 September (9:00 hrs) until 5 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: Angela Caredda, LDEHonoursSustainability@cml.leidenuniv.nl.