Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "The Design of Civic Public Displays for Human-Data Interaction" "Andrew Vande Moere" "Architecture and Design, Urban Design, Urbanism, Landscape and Planning" "The potential of public displays, i.e., screens situated in (semi-)public spaces, to make information more broadly accessible and facilitate a local dialog is becoming widely recognized. However, designing civic public displays that successfully do so involves tackling key challenges that impact their potential to deliver insight and spark social interaction. This dissertation investigates these challenges specifically of civic public displays for human-data interactions in which people are placed at the center. Based on five studies using real-world deployments, we consider challenges related to the role of the content, interaction, display materiality, context, and the involvement of stakeholders in the deployment process. Each case study focuses on a combination of these challenges and contains the design, in-the-wild deployment, and mixed-method evaluation of public displays. These studies emerged from a combination of academic research projects and practice-based commissions. Together, they enabled us to reveal the true requirements and potential impact of civic public displays, from the perspective of both citizens and civic organizations.This dissertation offers contributions in three ways: the design of the created prototypes themselves, their mixed-method evaluation with real users in real settings, and the formulation of design considerations through a civic public display framework. With these contributions, we aim to bring public displays closer to fulfilling their unique potential in civic engagement actions." "Development and validation of a new framework for the integration of technical and consumer-experience-based materials selection throughout the design process." "Ingrid Moons" "Product development, Marketing" "With the emergence of new materials, the available set of materials is rapidly growing both in type and number, each with their own characteristics and applications. Hence, materials selection in product design is a complex and costly process. Since people interact with materials through products, the products' materials should not only meet technical qualifications, but also appeal to the senses of the consumer, attribute specific meanings, provoke intended emotions, and be context-specific. Consequently, industrial design engineers should be supported in integrating these different material understandings, and especially in taking the consumer perspective into account. This research will focus on closing the knowledge gap in continuous materials selection support - customised to the evolving multidisciplinary needs of industrial design engineering - throughout the entire design process, with special focus upon consumer-centred aspects of design. The success of new products depends upon their adoption by end consumers and, therefore, particular attention should be paid to designing products in such a way that they appeal to these consumers and their consumption context [1]. The overall research objective is to develop and test a generic framework to support early (new) materials decisions, integrating technical and consumer-experiential aspects. The conceptual basis of the study project combines two methodologies: 'Research in Design Context' and 'Design Inclusive Research', that provide frameworks in which 'design' is considered as an evolving research process to arrive at a new product that is both technically optimal and consumer-centred. A stepwise research design combines existing data (literature review), consumer insights (workshops), insights in motives and criteria for material choices (qualitative research, quantitative model building with professionals) and case studies (validating of the methodology with companies) The research project thus attempts to provide and test a methodology to bridge the current technical - consumer-experiential imbalance in industrial design engineering and to enhance the consumer perspective in this process. It can also improve the adoption of new materials and products. The theoretical and methodological contribution is that the project aims at developing and testing a new framework for materials selection in the design process that integrates both perspectives, for an increased adoption of newly developed products in the market place. A combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches and inductive and deductive reasoning in a mixed methods approach is used." "Innovative Designs for Integration in Catalyst Recycling Strategies (INNOCAT)" "Steven Nolan" "Department of Chemistry" "Herein, I describe the development of innovative solutions with regards to the issue of transition metal- N-heterocyclic carbene catalyst recycling/separation, which is an important frontier of modern industrial applied chemistry. I plan on developing a platform of reaction systems based on specially designed metal-NHC catalysts that have increased potential for cutting-edge recycling techniques and combine efficiency with reusability." "Next generation algorithms for partitioned fluid-structure interaction" "Joris Degroote" "Department of Electromechanical, Systems and Metal Engineering" "An increasing number of applications require the coupling of effects from different physical fields. A leading role is played by the field of fluid-structure interaction, which investigates systems where flow and structural motion cannot be decoupled. Although these phenomena are widespread, their numerical simulation is only moderately used due to the tremendous computational cost and required expert knowledge. The high cost is caused by the iterative procedure within each time step and is aggravated by inherent numerical instabilities, increasing the number of the coupling iterations. In the state of the art, these instabilities are countered through the implementation of quasi-Newton methods, where the Jacobian of the coupled system is approximated based on previous subproblem evaluations. However, these techniques show important shortcomings, which this proposal intends to overcome by developing algorithms that automatically and dynamically set the subproblem solver tolerances, perform an automated classification and treatment of nonlinearities, and automatically learn the time-dependent behavior. In this way, I intend to drastically improve the computational efficiency and robustness of fluid-structure simulations, allowing for simulations that were previously very difficult or even impossible and boosting a more widespread use of numerical fluid-structure interaction simulations, eventually enabling advancement in the fields of renewable energy, health and many more." "Cyclic soil-structure interaction framework for the foundations of offshore renewable energy structures" "Georgios Anogiatis" "Hydraulics and Geotechnics, Structural Mechanics, University of Melbourne" "Recent developments in offshore renewable energy sector have resulted in bigger wind turbines and thus an increase in the mostly commonly used monopile foundation’s diameter to guarantee their performance especially under higher lateral cyclic loads due to waves and wind. Taking into account the effects of the cyclic loading especially on the long-term foundations’ capacity, highlights the monopiles’ ability to control the response as well as the life span of such energy infrastructure. Despite the diverse group of available approaches to estimate cyclic soil-structure response, an alternative which can considers strain accumulation by means of a thermodynamically consistent, multi-surface plasticity framework to generate more accurate predictions of cyclic long-term displacements, remains still unexplored. In this regard, this joint KU Leuven (KUL) - University of Melbourne (UoM) project aims to develop a novel three-dimensional (3D) soil-structure interaction model for monopiles subjected to lateral cyclic loading in sand by means of a finite element solution using advanced soil constitutive modeling and laboratory testing. Theoretical development will include model calibration via a laboratory cyclic testing programme and application to monopile-soil interaction problems including comparisons with predictions from existing models and available test data. The outcomes of the project will be integrated into an accessible design tool to enable better predictability of monopiles cyclic capacity in engineering practice. The successful candidate will be primarily based at KUL to conduct the theoretical work and will spend a period of 12 months at UoM to conduct the experimental work." "Towards a blueprint for successful collaborative writing and revision in higher education: the interplay of instruction, interaction and writing processes and  task complexity and their relation to text quality." "Elke Van Steendam" "Language, Education and Society, Brussels Campus" "In education, collaborative writing has shown its advantages both for language and content learning. When writers collaborate to write a text, they can pool resources, offer each other assistance and observe each others learning and writing processes, which may translate in more effective writing processes and in better texts. For collaborative writing to have a positive outcome, a few conditions need to be met. Crucial for peer collaboration in writing or revision to be effective is instruction. However, other factors such as task complexity and collaborative processes may be equally important. It is precisely this mix of different factors which we investigate in a series of empirical studies. Considerable research has been done on separate components but very few studies look into the interaction between the components. A complete, evidence-based theory on collaborative writing, however, should specify these relations. Only then can we have an insight into crucial design parameters for collaborative writing a nd its full potential for education." "Design with/for trust; Design research into platforms for sustainable learning on how to share space in more caring ways (working title)" "Liesbeth HUYBRECHTS" ArcK "The public space - the street - belongs to all of us. However, during the last century, in many European cities, the mobility system, and more specifically the dominance of the car, has gradually reduced and divided the space for people literally, but also figuratively. There exists a growing uncertainty and disagreement about how to deal with the complex challenge of increasingly busy car roads: their economic and functional necessity is weighed against their disadvantages for social cohesion and ecological balance (Illich, 1974; Gehl, 2010, Verkade, 2020). Within the context of the complex North-South Limburg project (Studio NZL, 2019), which focuses on the redesign process of a very busy and important regional connection in a rather rural part of Flanders, called Limburg, we question the current mobility system as something that for years has ""divided"" the community and its politics by rediscovering it as a shared space. We are developing a platform-methodology based on what connects us. In this context, we decide not to start from what divides people, but examines ""sharing"" as a stepping stone for a sustainable mobility transition. We questioned the current mobility system as something that ""divides"" by learning together about mobility and its interactions with everyday life: how do we think about mobility and its interaction and how do we want to shape it. By researching together ""what we share"" (Huybrechts, Palimieri and Devisch, 2018), we build on a tradition of participatory design research that looks at ""commons"" (Berlant, 2016; Gil and Baldwin, 2014; Marttila, Botero, & Saad- Sulonen, 2014; Seravalli, 2014; Teli, 2019) and ""partial economies"" (Avram, Choi, De Paoli, Light, Lyle, & Teli, 2017). Today, a participatory process is often a ""moment of alignment and knowledge exchange"". The question is whether such a process today should or could not do more? On a methodical level, we say that, in an increasingly uncertain world, a spatial process should provide a home - a ""Platform"" - where closer, more caring connections can be made between people to create stronger and learning communities with confidence in each other and for the future. On a thematic level, we say that if we approach mobility and the street as a theme we share, it opens a new dimension of living together. In general, we can decide that this platform-methodology provides both methodological and thematic guidance through the collaborative learning of future-oriented skills in shaping space in increasingly uncertain circumstances." "Kinetic-hybrid methods for uncertainty quantification and robust divertor design for fusion energy reactors" "Giovanni Samaey" "Applied Mechanics and Energy conversion (TME), Numerical Analysis and Applied Mathematics (NUMA)" "Simulation of systems of interacting particles is ubiquitous in science and engineering, but still poses significant computational challenges. In this project, we will study systems of this type that are modeled via Boltzmann-type kinetic equations that describe the evolution of a distribution of particles in position-velocity phase space as a sequence of free flights and collisions. In high-collisional regimes, simulating processes becomes prohibitively costly because of the time-scale separation between the (fast) time scales of individual collisions and the (slow) time scale at which the distribution evolves as a whole. At the same time, approximate macroscopic models exist in this regime, that only take into account macroscopic quantities, such as density, momentum or energy. This project aims at developing numerical methods that correct the approximate macroscopic models in the high-collisional limit by a Monte Carlo simulation of a limited number of kinetic particles. In particular, we will perform a systematic study of a particular class of methods, called asymptotic preserving (AP), that naturally transition from a kinetic particle to a continuum description in the limit when the continuum description becomes valid." "Design for Embodied Mediation." "Lukas Van Campenhout" "Product development" "This research project is about everyday interactive products: digital cameras, washing machines, TV and audio sets, pocket calculators, electrical bikes, electronic toys, etc. It focuses on the mediation of these products: their ability to influence people's behavior in the long run. We want to give designers of such interactive products fundamental insight in the mechanism of mediation, in order to turn mediation into a design driver: a product objective that can be actively steered by the designer, during the design process. More specifically, we want to investigate how an embodied interaction approach to the design of these products influences their mediation. The project employs a Research-through-Design (RtD) methodology, combined with a long-term field test. As a practical context for the RtD process, we choose the conception of an interactive product with a predefined mediation. The product aims to stimulate the connection of elderly people over 70 with their close family and friends, in order to counter their isolation and feeling of loneliness. It is an interactive household product, located in the home of the older person. In a first, exploratory part of the project, the interactive product is preliminarily designed, with its predefined mediation in mind. Through an iterative process of design, user testing and reflection, we get a grip on the concept of mediation as a design driver and on its intertwinement with embodied interaction, in the design process of an interactive product. In a second part, a demonstrator of the newly designed product is developed and produced in a small series. These demonstrators are deployed in a long-term field test, and placed at participants' homes for several weeks. Through regular interviews and recorded demonstrator data, the interaction patterns of the participants with the demonstrator are revealed, and compared with the predefined mediation. Throughout the project, the Design for Embodied Mediation framework is gradually forged, and tested by setting up design projects for students at Product Development, University of Antwerp, and at Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology. The relevance of the framework for design practice is assessed by confronting it with professional design experts." "Polysaccharide Esters for the Topochemical Design of Biointerfaces" "Pedro Fardim" "Chemical and Biochemical Reactor Engineering and Safety (CREaS)" "Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine are rapidly growing multidisciplinary fields that lie at the interface of medicine, engineering, and life sciences. Through a combination of biomaterial design, biomolecules, and cells, three-dimensional structures known as scaffolds are developed to recreate a suitable cell microenvironment to stimulate the repair or regeneration of a given tissue or organ. However, while it has become increasingly clear that the surface physico-chemical properties of biomaterials have an influence on cell fate and survival, there remains little to no control over these properties in produced scaffolds as well as little understanding of their underlying mechanisms. The rational and precise design of these materials will thus be crucial in gaining control over the interactions that these materials have within a cellular context, while also aiding in uncovering the molecular mechanisms involved.To this end, polysaccharides present themselves as an ideal, and underutilised, set of materials to design model surfaces for the study of cell-surface interactions. These abundant and renewable materials permit a highly tailorable chemistry, have an inherent biological compatibility, and present many structural and functional parallels to the native extracellular matrix. A patterned dextran ester platform was thus produced using a simple in-house procedure, involving the novel application of thermal nanoimprint lithography to a polysaccharide-based biological platform. The developed procedure yielded a platform with control over the synergistic properties of surface chemistry, surface roughness, and surface topography, that was suitable for the culture of bovine aortic endothelial cells. Upon patterning, the platforms displayed distinct regions of roughness, restricting cell adhesion to the smoothest surfaces, while guiding multicellular arrangements in the patterned topographies. This both suggests that a fine balance of surface properties is sufficient in controlling this behaviour, while emphasizing the importance of the combined impacts of surface properties in a biological context. The development of biomaterial interfaces through topochemical fabrication such as this could prove useful in designing functional platforms for understanding protein and cell-surface interactions."