This Special Focus highlights the potential of transdisciplinary research and learning to confront the complexity of the challenges facing society today. By serving as a bridge between science, practice and society, transdisciplinarity can be a means to help foster collaboration between diverse actors, question existing paradigms of knowledge co-production and build pathways towards transformation@en

Real-world laboratories (RWL) aim to support transformations for sustainable urban development by producing outputs with practical and scientific relevance. To achieve these aims, the local community of which the RWL is a part should be in close collaboration from the start of a project. RWLs offer spaces for ‘thinking outside the box’ and for experimenting with new ideas through concrete interventions into the life world of the community. We provide methodological guidance for researchers on how to design interventions in RWLs that both affect change on the ground and contribute to scientific knowledge. This includes addressing issues important to local communities and generating transformation knowledge about how sustainable urban development can be actualised. We use the case of a project-based master’s course within an RWL in the city of Zurich in Switzerland to demonstrate how the use of design thinking supported the development of needs-based interventions, curbing emissions from food consumption while aiming to generate scientifically relevant output. We conclude that further improvements in methodology are needed in order to test the effectiveness of interventions. However, the outputs of the approach show its potential both for having an impact in the real world and building on existing academic concepts for advancing transformation knowledge.@en

In this communication, we present the background and core elements of the 2021 edition of the International Transdisciplinarity Conference. Beginning with a brief history of how the event was initiated and the role played by saguf in supporting its development, we then detail the main features of the conference and its relevance for transdisciplinary sustainability research and education. @en

This chapter discusses how complex, real-world topics related to sustainable development are tackled through a curriculum that fosters transdisciplinary skills and thinking for students at an environmental sciences department at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland (ETH Zurich). We describe a process through which university students at all levels learn how to handle complex, real-world problems. We argue that the ability to frame complex problems and the ability to empathize with diverse points-of-view are key skills for transdisciplinary learning and research. Competence fields are identified by reflecting on the actual skills needed for conducting a transdisciplinary research process and by identifying elements from past teaching experiences that have proven to be effective. We then develop a framework which shows how these competence fields link different learning domains, so that students develop not only cognitive, but also affective and psychomotor abilities. This framework may serve as a starting point for the design of other courses aimed at training transdisciplinarians.@en