Client cases: Designing Sustainability Transitions

Ready to make an impact on the world’s biggest challenges? By collaborating with real clients on real-world challenges, you’ll gain hands-on experience in designing sustainability transitions.

What would a sustainable future look like? How do we get there? And how can we design for it? Developing your own answers to these three questions will be the core of this minor.

As awareness of the sustainability crisis grows, the challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and their impacts on societies, economies, and well-being become impossible to ignore. This minor will guide you in adopting the necessary perspective to create change and discover your role in overcoming the pressing environmental and social issues.

Sustainability will be approached from both environmental and social perspectives. The underlying philosophy of this minor is that, in order to design for sustainability, you need to consider the whole system and go beyond resource efficient products and services.

You will learn about different topics and concepts that are central to designing sustainability transitions, such as societal change, transition management, complex systems, systemic design, social design, the circular design strategies, design for behaviour change, futuring, materials, values and ethics, sustainable entrepreneurship and co-creation.

This minor provides an opportunity to experience real interdisciplinary teamwork as you will work together with fellow students from other faculties and universities. Teams will be able to think beyond their field of expertise, acquire creative design skills while sharing their disciplinary knowledge. You will critically reflect on the ethical considerations of design for sustainability and gain an unique experience working on leading topics with some frontrunner companies and larger organisations.

• Analyse the different elements of complex sustainable systems, in the context of the challenge of addressing societal needs within our planetary boundaries.
• Evaluate processes of change towards a sustainable future at different scales, from individual users to complete societal systems.
• Form arguments for your own perspective on how transitions could take place.
• Apply your knowledge from the theoratical courses, and use different tools and techniques introduced by experts in guest lectures and workshops, in your practical projects and client case.
• Develop, prototype and test solutions for your client case that are adaptable, scalable, and impactful from a societal and environmental persepective
• Gain experience in carrying out project work in multidisciplinary teams
• Apply communication and collaboration skills towards sustainability challenges in the real world

Registration for this thematic minor is on a first-come, first-served basis and available places. (No lottery draw).

This minor is open for students from all faculties within TU Delft, as well as external students from Erasmus University Rotterdam and Leiden University and international students. Check all entry requirements before registering.

It is a full time minor. This means that you have to spend 40 h/week and attendance on campus is required on most of the days because of collaborative workshops.

Student at Leiden University, TU Delft or Erasmus University Rotterdam?
Check the eligibility matrix to see if your bachelor’s degree programme offers access to this and other minors at https://www.tudelft.nl/minor

Student at another educational institution?
External students cannot register via EduXchange. Interested in this minor, read the whole registration procedure at https://www.tudelft.nl/minor

For additional information on this minor, visit the TU Delftminor page.

The minor consists of different courses all tested separately. The courses consist of project work in groups, lectures, expert talks, workshops, group discussions and field trips.

Check the detailed overview of courses, learning activities and study load at https://www.studyguide.tudelft.nl/