Impact Designs: Engineering and Sustainability through Student Service (IDEASS)

IDEASS is a year-long sequence designed to advance students as change agents prepared to contribute to game-changing efforts to bring about a more sustainable world. It represents an extraordinary opportunity for you to help design and move on sustainable development projects that explore new technologies or strategies for advancing lasting technical, economic, social, cultural and environmental change on campus and throughout the Monterey Bay region. 2021-2022 marks the 11th year since the launch of the IDEASS program, which is now the capstone for the Sustainability Studies Minor at Rachel Carson College.

You will work with an interdisciplinary project team to integrate the different dimensions of complex sustainability challenges. Science, technology, engineering, mathematics, sociology, ecology and especially… innovative design practices are all critical to this interdisciplinary and community centered approach.

IDEASS students develop project objectives within their areas of interest cooperatively with community mentors and experts in the field. Community and industry partners benefit from collaboration with motivated students who have been carefully selected for participation in IDEASS. These student-led teams, guided by a group of four UCSC IDEASS academic advisors have a strong reputation for on-time deliverables that fulfill some objective known to be important to major stakeholders. Projects usually focus on sustainable technologies and practices in the built environment, such as energy, water, food, transportation and waste. Depending on student experience and partners’ needs, projects may use any number of approaches to address environmental concerns, such as technological innovation, education and behavior change, participatory research, policy planning, and other modes of sustainable design.