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 24 and maximum 30.
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.
Dates and locations (alternate between 3 locations: Leiden (The Hague), Delft & Erasmus):
January 17 Leiden (The Hague)
January 31 Delft
February 14 Erasmus
February 28 Leiden (The Hague)
March 14 Delft
March 21 Erasmus
March 28 Leiden (The Hague)
April 4 Delft
April 11 Erasmus
April 18 Leiden (The Hague)
April 25 Delft
May 2 Erasmus
May 9 Leiden (The Hague)
May 16 Delft
May 23 Erasmus
May 30 Leiden (The Hague)
June 6 Erasmus
June 13 Delft
June 20 Leiden (The Hague)
June 27 Leiden (The Hague)
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 look as follows:
10% Participation assessed continually through participation in seminars
20% Presentation of the final product (June 13th 2023)
30% midterm group report of the project proposal & design brief (deadline April 11th 2023)
40% final group report of the product of 6000-7000 words (deadline June 27th 2023) • 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 exams.
The assessment methods will be further explained in the first session of the class.
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 2022 up to noon 19 October 2022 (12:00hr), 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.
Please note for Delft students: Interested TU Delft students should first have been selected as Honours Programme Bachelor (HPB) students by their respective faculty. Only HPB students are eligible to register for this programme.
Contact
Programme coordinator: Esther van der Ent, LDEHonoursSustainability@cml.leidenuniv.nl.