The Da Vinci Project is a university wide twenty week undergraduate honours programme at Utrecht University. It offers transdisciplinary challenge based education focused on sustainability and the transition to a circular economy while bridging the gap between academic theory and societal practice.
Design of the Program
The programme is built on the pillars of challenge-based learning and design thinking. Working in diverse teams of four to six, students tackle sustainability problems provided by external partners ranging from multinational corporations to local government bodies, such as ASML, Rabobank, and The Ocean Cleanup. The curriculum follows an iterative design process based on an adapted Stanford d.school model, engaging students in ethnographic research, reframing the challenge, ideation and prototyping. The result of two design cycles is a validated prototype for a sustainable, viable, feasible and desirable solution. Examples include a circular fabric from confiscated counterfeit textiles or a circular paint retail concept. The programme primarily takes place during evening sessions and features interactive college tours with industry experts, coaching, and hands-on design thinking workshops that encourage students to engage both their hands and their brains. More information about the project, the challenges, and the partners can be found here: davinciproject.nl.
Learning Objectives
The overall aim of the project is to foster sustainability change-maker competence. Educational research on the project has shown students develop multiple key competences for sustainability and Inner Development Goals. Students mainly enhance inter- and intra-personal competencies such as collaboration, communication, empathy, and resilience. Learning objectives include transdisciplinary collaboration where students learn to bridge different academic languages and work effectively in multi- stakeholder environments. They also learn to navigate uncertainty by developing the resilience to stay productive within the complexity of real world sustainability transitions. Finally, the programme builds creative confidence by cultivating the ability to think outside disciplinary silos and use prototyping as a tool for communication and
Successes and Challenges
Successes of the project include tangible impact where several student prototypes have been implemented by partners, such as circular laptop stands manufactured from industrial metal waste for ASML. The programme has achieved radical interdisciplinarity by successfully integrating students from over thirty different bachelor degrees ranging from theoretical physics and chemistry to antropology and liberal arts. Evaluation data confirm a significant increase in interdisciplinary literacy, complexity thinking, and professional networking capabilities of the participants. Regarding challenges, students often struggle during the messy middle of the process due to the deliberate lack of a pre defined solution. This requires intensive coaching to transform frustration into productive friction. There is also often initial epistemic friction marked by difficulty in aligning different disciplinary perspectives into a single cohesive team vision. Furthermore, it is challenging to maintain stakeholder committment for a longer time and to keep an interdsiciplinary team of senior teaching staff engaged.
Scale and Structure
The Da Vinci Project is an extra-curricular annual programme worth 10 credits that runs from September to February. It involves a selective cohort of approximately twenty to thirty high achieving second and third year bachelor and pre master students. The support system consists of a triangle of support involving a process coach for team dynamics, subject matter experts, and a challenge owner from the partner organisation.
Vision for the Future
The vision for the Da Vinci Project is to become a permanent learning community for sustainability challenges. Future goals include strengthening the partner network to explore sustainability challenges for a longer period to achieve in-depth insights and foster co-creation. The project aims to empower a new generation of professionals who are not only experts in their respective fields but also resilient leaders capable of driving systemic change.
