Sustainability and energy transition in Swiss universities of applied sciences

Abstract

The University of Applied Science (UAS) in Switzerland were reformed around 25 years ago and have since achieved considerable success in education and applied research. At the core of the UAS mission are the challenges of realizing sustainability in the industrial context and determining how to tackle the energy transition. This paper presents two examples (residential buildings and consumer products) to demonstrate how the aforementioned challenges are confronted in the UAS. These examples bring the necessity to confront sustainability in a comprehensive and interdisciplinary way. Engineering skills should be complemented with knowledge of integration among the human and technological aspects of a project.