Honoursmodule: How Tech is Sustainability

Course manual 2024/2025

Course content

A sustainable society is a wicked problem, as it addresses sub problems form various domains, such as politics, economics, ecology, technology, ethics, ideology, and so forth. In addition, it applies on different organisational levels, such as region, national, international, society and industry.

The aim of this course is to get a better understanding of how far a sustainable society can go and under which circumstances technology is a necessary part.

In this course, we first investigate the problem space of “food” to identify which topics we work on in more detail in the remaining 2/3 of the course, with a focus on those two question:

• What is the role of technology and what can it provide to help building a sustainable society.
• What is required in cases where technology cannot provide enough to facilitate sustainability?

The 4 first sessions cover the following topics:

• Sustainability – definitions, concepts and personal views
• Introduction to complexity and intelligence
• Introduction to services
• Introduction to sensor, data, and technology

The remaining 7 lectures will be based on the problems that were chosen to be investigated.

Objectives

• Carry out a literature study to describe current issues related to sustainability as well as historical research landmarks and future directions
• Critique, analyse, and reflect on peer-reviewed research articles that describe real-world systems, with respect to how well they support or facilitate a sustainable society.
• Identify the stakeholders in a particular sustainability problem space.
• Explain the basic technologies and architectures for complex systems and assess how technical solutions can work in the face of real-world constraints
• Reflect and understand how biases direct research
• Systematically carry out and present the own research in an essay and a poster presentation

Teaching methods

• Seminar
• Presentation/symposium
• Self-study
• Supervision/feedback meeting

The course is designed for interaction, collaborative and explorative work. Seminars are considered as room for the explanation and discussion of essential concepts and examples of various forms of sustainable systems. They are also considered as a space to discuss research directions students develop. The aim is to reflect on approaches with respect to their usefulness and usability.

Learning activities

Assessment

Even though students work in groups, at the end of the course each student has to provide an individual essay of  max 4000 words that discusses one of the addressed topics of the course in detail. The essay has to define a problem space, provide an overview of current theory and the description of a potential technological solution of one of the addressed problems. This covers 90% of the grade.

The final group presentation counts for 10% of the grade.

Details:

Inspection of assessed work

The students can investigate the assessment of their work during the week following the announcement of the final grade.

Assignments

The report is individual. The poster presentation is a group effort.

Fraud and plagiarism

The 'Regulations governing fraud and plagiarism for UvA students' applies to this course. This will be monitored carefully. Upon suspicion of fraud or plagiarism the Examinations Board of the programme will be informed. For the 'Regulations governing fraud and plagiarism for UvA students' see: www.student.uva.nl

Course structure

Last year's student feedback

In order to provide students some insight how we use the feedback of student evaluations to enhance the quality of education, we decided to include the table below in all course guides.

Contact information

Coordinator

• dr. Frank Nack