Our Courses

The complexity of societal challenges will increasingly require different disciplines and perspectives to think and work together. Collaboration brings both opportunities and challenges to the table. One of these challenges is to recognize, understand, and communicate across disciplinary boundaries and to arrive at transdisciplinary learning spaces. This course provides students with the necessary tools and knowledge to engage in transdisciplinary collaboration. 

This course helps you attain knowledge, methods and the critical-reflective attitude that can be used to foster ‘creative intelligence’ when dealing with complex societal challenges, in a transdisciplinary context. Building on theories of design thinking and insights from design practice and creative facilitation we will explore together with you, new ways of making that know-how effective in transdisciplinary settings. 

In our course, you learn to create tools and materials to support a creative group activity (for example, a workshop), involving people (stakeholders, experts, participants) from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds. The tools and materials you will create are aimed at creating shared understanding and the collaborative generation of breakthrough ideas and insights that help the group in dealing with the challenge at hand. In short, we will focus on supporting transdisciplinary communication processes with effective creative tools and materials. 

Societies all over the world grapple with socio-technical transformations that cause a divide between worldviews, political beliefs, interests, and ways of living. Moreover, we face grand challenges of climate change, inequality, health, and environmental degradation. This course prepares you to take up these challenges proactively and design interventions that co-shape societies for so-called pluriversal futures, in which multiple ways of being, knowing and making can co-exist. You will develop the mindset, knowledge, and skills to help transform - together with regional stakeholders - the social, environmental, and economic system. In this course you will work in a transdisciplinary manner, connect global challenges with local actions, histories with futures, academic with societal perspectives, action with reflection, and critical modes with creative modes of thinking and design.

More concretely, this course centers around a real-world challenge-based project. It is partly carried out with the entire group, and partly in small teams. In the context of the project, you will combine a thorough socio-technical and historical analysis of the challenge with a deep understanding of its local context and conduct hands-on co-imagining and co-shaping activities with different representatives from academia, government, industry, and society. These activities allow you to develop advanced design, analysis, and leadership skills. In this course you will learn unique, transdisciplinary methods for framing and analyzing problems and for responsible futuring and prototyping. Together, you will make a difference in society. Activating workshops, intensive coaching sessions, field trips and inspiring guest lectures will support the project. The final product is a challenge analysis and an experiential provocative prototype of pluriversal futures, aimed at engaging stakeholders in a transformation of society in a local context. The assessment of the final product, its justification, and its presentation is pass/fail, with extensive feedback for your personal and professional development. It will be carried out by a broad team of teachers and external stakeholders.

This course combines systems thinking and change making. We follow a challenge-based approach to holistically assess complex system behaviors by examining their various complexities, including technical, human, political, resource, and environmental processes. Thereby, we aim to understand how changes and various design solution alternatives impact the extended life of systems and organizations. Exploring how to manage changes in the design, development, and deployment of systems requires individuals to conceptualize and understand the inherent complexities. It also requires ongoing planning and implementing organizational, team, or individual change within the working environment.  

Big plans for innovative initiatives that change our lives in various ways are easier designed than realized. In this course you will increase your knowledge of and skills in the change making process which has many different layers: cognitive, behavioral, and affective. What are your unique talents and skills as a change agent? How can you persuade others and mobilize them to participate in the change? What factors must be considered when trying to change or co-create with (transdisciplinary and cross-cultural) colleagues, teams, among whole organizations, or even societies? How can you span boundaries and act inclusively regardless of existing schemes such as hierarchy/seniority? You will also learn to assess system behaviors by examining the various complexities of engineering systems, including technical, human, political, resource, and environmental processes, to get a holistic view of how changes and various design solution alternatives impact the extended life of systems. The world is filled with messy, complex, ‘wicked’ problems. These issues are multi-layered, circular, and systemic in nature. Yet, many engineers, managers, and analysts attempt to simplify these systems into linear models with simple relationships. The consequence of this approach is that adopted interventions tend to only work for the short term, if they work at all, or have significant unintended consequences.