Health for Tomorrow (2021)

Are you healthy? What benefits to your well-being? You do your daily workout, take a course in mindfulness and drink your green smoothie. On top of that, your health efforts are being supported by a smart watch telling you how much you slept, your current heart rate and when it is time to move.

If you do get sick, new medical technologies perform diagnostics and treatments that weren’t believed to be possible a decade ago. In the near future your patient file may be accessible from any hospital within the country. And soon doctors will prescribe personalized drugs based on your individual needs.

However, the advances in medicine also pose challenging questions. Do you really want to know the results of a genome test which predicts your predisposition for disease? Who owns our health data and how can it be protected? How far should a government go to protect the health of their citizens? What is the value of life and how much are we willing to pay for it?

During ETH Week we will deep-dive into these topics, identify pressing problems and design solutions for sustainable health and well-being.

Meet the teams of 2021:

ETH Week 2021 has been organised in close collaboration with Margrit Leuthold and Wolfgang Langhans. We thank you our Hub partner external pageBalgrist University Hospital and kindly acknowledge the support of ETH Week 2021 through external pageTrilogos Foundation.

Please read the article of ETH Week 2021 "Health for Tomorrow" here and have a look at our visual summary of the week here, as well as at the Downloadworkbooks of ETH Week 2021 which guided the students through the entire week.

Impressions of ETH Week 2021 "Health For Tomorrow"

All images: Alessandro Della Bella

Hub Edition

With the goal to keep the essence and spirit of ETH Week and to allow for new ways of enganging, collaborating and learning, we developed a hybrid format for ETH Week. In short, the next edition of ETH Week takes place in two hubs at the same time. The exchange across the hubs, mainly during plenary sessions, is virtual. The collaboration in the interdisciplinary student teams, the interaction with experts and the participation in plenary sessions, remains mainly in person.

Multiple Hubs Locations
Whenever possible ETH Week is taking place at locations related to the annual topic, for example, the ETH Fernheizkraftwerk for the topic of Energy, or the SBB Werkstätten for the topic of mobility. These were two great venues, but it is not always that easy to find locations that match the topic and are spacious enough to host ETH Week. Having a format that allows collaborating across different locations offers more flexibility not only in choosing suitable locations but also potential partners. What is more, the number of participants is typically limited by the location. Having several locations might allow us to scale the format and engage more students.

Team Work
The work in interdisciplinary student teams is what makes ETH Week special and memorable. Learning how to collaborate in an interdisciplinary team, make decisions and overcome personal issues, is one of the key skills that participants of ETH Week develop. Hence, the work within the student teams remains in person in the hub edition too. The exchange with other teams, for example in feedback sessions, can be both in person with in the same hub, or virtual across hubs. We will experiment with both modes of interaction in this year’s pilot.

Faculty Input & Keynote Speeches
A group of outstanding faculty members and keynote speakers provides the students with inputs from research and practice. These inputs talk are not only highly informative but also very inspirational. For the participants it is a great opportunity to listen to these experts, to interact with them in the Q&A sessions and to socialize with them during the breaks. Part of the hub concept is that the students will experience both live talks in their respective hubs and talks streamed from the other hubs. Moreover, this hybrid format allows us to involve experts that might not be able to travel to ETH Zurich in person.

Field Trips & Knowledge Fair
The exchange with experts is central to the ETH Week experience. The personal interaction between students and experts is reported as invaluable by both the students and the experts. The richness and quality of this exchange cannot be matched in a virtual setting, hence two, although smaller, knowledge fairs are being set up at either hub location. In the case of field trips, another element becomes key. Students shall have the possibility to immerse in a specific, local environment and collected knowledge situated in the context. Also this is difficult, if not impossible, to mirror in an online setting.

Overall, there we see a lot of potential in the newly developed hub format. With the pilot in 2021, we start exploring possibilities to decentralize and contextualize ETH Week in new ways. And we will learn about the complexity and challenges of decentralized collaboration at the scale of the ETH Week.