The Centre for Unusual Collaborations is thrilled to announce that three new Spark teams have been funded following the latest call for applications. These teams were formed by researchers who participated in the Spark workshops (phase one) in March 2025. The teams have each been granted 9,000 Euro to explore the potential of their idea in the upcoming year.
All teams will shortly get their own project page, so make sure to keep an eye on the Spark teams page.
The latest call for applications was the last call for Spark grants in their current form. CUCo is currently developing a new learning journey, to be launched in Fall 2026. For that reason, no Spark workshops will take place in Fall 2025 and Spring 2026.
Feeling Futures
Exploring emotional impacts on pro-environmental lifeways
Today’s sustainability challenges demand drastic and rapid changes in our lives, but our actions lag behind. A core reason is that our emotions play a crucial role in maintaining or challenging dominant structures of production and consumption. How we feel influences how we produce and consume, and how we produce and consume shapes how we feel. A good example is the narrative of consumption as an act of self-care.
Read more
Feeling Futures explores the powerful but often overlooked role of emotions in shaping people’s aspirations and, with this, the behaviours and policies people are drawn to. We propose that acknowledging and working with emotions can unlock new possibilities as to what is politically possible and desirable. We are particularly interested in how emotions are related to particular ways of thinking, doing, and relating (from using your bike instead of your car, to openness to new political programmes).
This project combines knowledge and methods from the sociology of emotions and critical feminist studies, environmental psychology, human-technology interaction, decision science, and environmental law to explore the relationship between emotions and the environmental futures people consider possible and desirable, and how different interventions can shift our aspirations for these futures.
Micro scale for greater impact
Engineering and regulating living materials for planetary health
Planetary health is under growing pressure from challenges like environmental pollution, food insecurity and systemic health threats. One emerging solution lies in the use of Engineered Living Materials (ELMs): materials made from living or partially living cells, designed to perform beneficial functions in the environment.
Read more
ELMs could one day clean polluted soil, combat harmful bacteria, or support safer, more sustainable food and health systems. Microorganisms, often invisible and underestimated, have adapted to Earth’s toughest conditions for billions of years. Now they might help us meet today’s global challenges, in the form of ELMs. With their promise comes responsibility, as they are alive and can interact with ecosystems in complex ways.
This project investigates how to use them safely and ethically in areas like agriculture, public health, and sustainable design. Our team with its diverse backgrounds will collaborate with policymakers, stakeholders, and the public to guide our research. Thereby we aim to ensure that the development of ELMs is responsible and grounded in societal needs.
Together, we will put our initial spark to the test while exploring how tiny life forms can support a healthier future and imagining how ELMs might shape everyday life in the year 2080.
ReDOSE
Moving Towards a Circular Pharmaceutical Ecosystem
Imagine a pharmaceutical industry where life-saving medicines are not only effective but also help preserves nature- an industry where care for nature is woven into every decision, every innovation, every practice, rather than treated as an afterthought. Today’s reality is far from this vision. Despite its vital role in public health, the pharmaceutical industry contributes to significant environmental harm: wasteful overproduction, single-use packaging, and fragmented, linear supply chains. Circular solutions exist, but are rarely embedded in daily practices, policies, or institutional norms.
Read more
The ReDOSE project brings together an unconventional team—spanning sustainability science, education, healthcare systems, innovation, AI, and institutional perspective—to co-design a truly circular pharmaceutical ecosystem. Through novel methods, participatory approach, AI-based text and image analysis, and advanced decision-making tools, we map systemic bottlenecks and align technical, social, and regulatory dimensions. By involving and co-creating with pharmacists, patients, manufacturers, waste managers, and regulators, we ensure that circular strategies are not just discussed but embedded, i.e. transformative learning—tested for their institutionalization across sectors.
ReDOSE offers not just a plan but a process for a change: grounded in data, shaped by relevant stakeholders, and designed for impact. Together, we aim to contribute to a meaningful step toward The Netherlands` 2050 circular economy goal, starting with the pills in our hands and the systems behind them.
