About Us

Our Vision

The TdLab is a place where students, lecturers, researchers, and other societal actors from diverse disciplinary, professional, and cultural horizons collaboratively define and tackle the complexities of sustainable development to respect environmental limits and uphold social justice for present and future generations.

Our Mission

The TdLab conceptualizes and tests educational and research approaches to tackle complexities of sustainable development.

• We enable students to experience and tackle real-world problems in the context of sustainable development through collaborative and reflective teaching.
• We give students freedom and responsibility to explore and experience interactive ways of doing methodologically sound research.
• We support teaching that moves beyond the classroom. We seek to strengthen intra- and cross-departmental teaching collaboration and build bridges within D-USYS and ETH.
• We support and develop research projects by providing conceptual input, tools and critical reflection on how to run inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration.
• We integrate knowledge and values from different scientific perspectives, as well as from other societal actors. We propose key expertise in problem framing and knowledge integration.
• We conduct research across disciplinary boundaries in close collaboration with societal stakeholders by applying a wide range of social science and transdisciplinary methods. Selection of topics is largely driven by societal concerns in different topical fields.
• We apply existing transdisciplinary concepts and methods, develop new ones, and reflect on their outcomes to further transdisciplinary research and teaching

While sound analysis of the problem at hand will remain paramount, attention has also increasingly been given to developing and implementing solutions (developing transformation knowledge).