How to Change the World

This intense and immersive activity forms part of a ‘spine’ of problem-based learning activity that runs through all the degree programmes within the IEP. It's interconnected with the other elements of both the IEP and discipline-based core learning. The final problem-based learning (PBL) element of the first two years, it adds significant societal context resulting in additional complexity, degrees of freedom and challenge to the navigation of the design cycle. 

The project begins with a problem that is highly undefined, very broad and rich in societal context, and contains within it the scope for multiple engineering solutions that will have varying impacts. This problem is real and current, and is derived from UN Sustainable Development Goals. The project emphasises the necessity for interdisciplinary work to address such urgent, high-level problems. As such, students work in fully interdisciplinary teams, each consisting of up to six engineering disciplines, computer scientists and those studying management sciences.

Students are required to consider a wider range of design criteria that demand analysis not just of the engineering feasibility but also of sociocultural desirability and viability. They must recognise that the systems they design and create, the applications they develop, and the management processes they implement will impact people and society.

Watch Professor Emanuela Tilley, IEP team member, provide an introduction to How to Change the World for UCL students:

Using facilitating workshops, students define their own area of focus within the problem based on how their own skills and understandings can work together in the team. Throughout the course of the project, students receive opportunities for discussion and feedback with a panel of external experts, from industry third or public sectors. Following their formulation of a brief, the teams move on to defining a solution, which they defend at the end of the activity to this panel of external experts.