Student Opportunities

MSc. Graduation project

Students from each IDE master’s program have the opportunity to initiate their graduation project with the lab. If you are interested, please email participatoryCityMaking-DDL@tudelft.nl.

Today’s complexity calls for new design approaches. We need methodologies that not only help to design innovative solutions but also to build the conditions for society’s capacity to change.

Over the past years, we have studied hundreds of changemakers who join forces to experiment with alternative ways of living and working mainly because they care about a better future.

Successful changemakers use design methods beyond imagination and foster systemic change in the long run. They use codesign as a transformative community-driven design method, their solutions are deeply rooted in the local context and they make changes at an institutional level.

Does this spark your interest? Through the Graduation Launchpad, you can join us in co-researching the following topics:

By joining this Graduation Launchpad, you will:

• Closely work with pioneering changemakers and other lab students/researchers.

• Participate in a ready-set workshop format to learn from earlier projects, explore what and how changemakers design, and understand their particular competencies to foster hyper-local transformations.

• Help develop the next generation of transformational codesign methodologies and contribute to building the conditions for change.

Participate in a ready-set workshop format.

At the PCM Lab, your graduation project is situated within our core research domains:

Value-driven innovation
Complex environments like cities are full of different interests, ambitions and visions of different stakeholders. How can identifying these values enable sustainable social innovation?

Collaborative design
Social designers work in a range of roles within industry, business, communities, education, and public sector. Including the voices of the people intended to use the design outcome, can lead to more impactful design as well as more democratic design practices. How do you involve the relevant stakeholders of the particular social system?

Scaling social impact
Many design proposals striving for mission-driven innovation introduce new perspectives in specific contexts but encounter challenges during implementation or when demonstrating impact. Even design solutions that prove successful in one urban environment face obstacles in replicating them in other cities or institutionalising them to scale their impact. How can strategic design facilitate and up-scale social innovations towards transformational change?

There are many themes in which you can position your topic of choice, and a lot of co-creative partnerships to join. To find inspiration for potential topics, explore our Lab’s blog posts, where you can discover insights and lessons from previous students.

Interested in migration? Read about PCM Lab graduate Ariele’s experience with this theme here.

Or perhaps creating textile futures together with our Co-Lead Dr. Holly McQuillan is the thing for you! Read about PCM Lab graduate Sterre’s experience with this theme here.

Other themes to explore include: joint value-creation with Co-Lead Dr. ir. Marina Bos-de Vos, energy justice with Co-Lead Dr. Natalia Romero Herrera, sound scapes with Co-Lead Dr. Elif Ozcan Vieira, climate action, healthy society, mobility, living with water, and many more.

Additionally, browse through graduation reports of alumni who have completed their graduation with the Lab to spark your ideas!

ID5501-16 Research Elective and/or ID5526 Submitting and Presenting a Paper

Students participate, on an individual basis, in one of the ongoing research projects in the PCM Lab.

Curious to see what that’s like? Read here about our Research Assistant Paul’s experience with co-researching in our lab!

Note: you do not have to register for these courses, but are free to set this up with the PCM Lab itself.

Elective IDEM1222 Designing Transformation

In this course we offer theoretical approaches to understanding change processes and explore how designers can address societal issues through their work. Students develop design competencies that position them as change-makers, enabling them to lead transformative processes that consider complex systems, social innovation, and interconnectedness at various scales. Grounded in real-life challenges and practices, students participate in open dialogues to construct transition narratives.

This is a programme elective of DfI theme 2: Design for Societal Innovation.

Honours Programme