Integrating systems and design thinking in transdisciplinary case studies

Abstract

In the new Bachelor-level course Umweltproblemlösen (Tackling environmental problems), a part of ETH Zurich’s Environmental Sciences Bachelor’s programme, we teach students to zoom in on elements of practice (design thinking) and to zoom out on the whole system (systems thinking). Participants take stakeholders’ interests and needs into account and prepare possible measures, thus developing transformation knowledge and anticipating their future role as transdisciplinary sustainability scientists. Umweltproblemlösen (Tackling environmental problems) is a Bachelor-level course that carries on a long tradition of transdisciplinary (td) case studies in the Environ mental Sciences curriculum at ETH Zurich. Td case studies introduce students to key features of transdisciplinarity. Two corres ponding learning goals of the case studies are 1. to not only analyse problems, but to also suggest solutions, and 2. to take the complexity of the tackled socio-ecological system into account. In the new course we address both learning goals by integrating systems and design thinking. We present this approach in detail to show how features of transdisciplinarity are transferred to learning contexts. We compare it to the approaches of other td case studies by asking how each interprets and addresses the two learning goals. The comparison shows that the case study approaches implicitly impart different ideas about how a td environmental scientist should support societal problem solving. A key difference to previous approach es is that the new course asks students to enter deeply into the world of practice and the stakeholders’ divergent needs.