In 2022 we received funding from the Knowledge Foundation (KK stiftelsen) to, for two years, work on an interdisciplinary education, based at Södertörn and Konstfack at the same time, for people from the broad field of “designed living environments”, i.e. the public sphere. We had worked in this field from different positions and had all experienced that spatial planning is becoming increasingly complex and is faced with increased demands to deal with ethical issues of everything from species extinction, climate change and inequality in an uncertain world. Practitioners in art, architecture, form and design as well as urban planning, market developing and construction are faced with new competence requirements activated by this, and there is a great need for an in-depth exchange of knowledge and experience between different capacities. We have also experienced that different capacities feel isolated from others, even when we discuss processes that involve many different experiences.During 2022–2023 we conducted a series of workshops with professional groups within the field following Pohl et al. (2017) on how to make research societally relevant. Based on the results of these workshops, we started to build two curricula, one at Södertörn University and one at Konstfack. Students can apply to both schools, depending on their educational background, and they will study together until the last semester, when they will do their thesis. The program, which will start in September 2024, is based on the assumption that there is a multiplicity of knowledge to be managed, and the challenge is to get the different perspectives to meet and learn from each other. This means that students (both) need to come to a deeper understanding of their own position to understand this position in relation to others. In this paper presentation we will discuss the challenges and learning outcomes with creating a course like this, highlighting that the cooperation with external stakeholders was relatively uncomplicated, but several challenges were discovered when it came to synchronizing two different types of universities. Topics ranged from different understandings of what constitutes an academic course, to how many students to accept, to how to synchronize two different academic bureaucratic systems.
QC 20250731