Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Development of a handover approach in design for dementia. Turning design research experiences with people living with dementia into accessible design processes, tools and artefacts for other designers." "Niels Hendriks" "Associated Faculty of the Arts, Inter-Actions Research Unit, Genk Campus" "The number of people living with dementia is rapidly growing and currently there is no treatment available. The development of products is of importance for the improvement of the lives of people living with dementia. To develop these products, designers can on the one hand involve people living with dementia in the design process. This participatory design approach provides rich insights, however in practice it’s often challenging for the two parties to meet for various reasons. On the other hand there’s the use of marketing data, quantitative reports and stereotype interpretations about people living with dementia, to communicate to designers, but giving them little empathic understanding for the lives of people living with dementia. The aim of the research is to develop an option in-between: an accessible handover approach for designers, who are unable to meet with people living with dementia in the design process, to grasp their richness and diversity and reach a certain level of empathy, to acquire insights into their product needs and increase the share on the market of products for people living with dementia." "Research on an evaluation method for assessing the sustainability of an architectural design from the early design stages. DESUSA method: DEsign SUpport for Sustainable Architecture" "Griet VERBEECK" "Niet onderzoeksgroep gebonden projecten" "Although sustainability is currently very topical,' sustainable building ' still gets too little attention in the current architectural design process. However, the design process offers a great potential to exercise an impact on the sustainability of a building. From the start of the design process the important characteristics of the building are being established, such as compactness and orientation, which have an impact on sustainability. However, in this phase of the design there is little information available from the designer and most decisions are based on intuition and experience. Moreover, the available information, such as checklists and guidelines, is not adapted to their use during the design process, and the evaluation of a design usually happens at the end , having an eye for the regulations.To make the designers be aware of the impact of their design decisions on the sustainability of the building, there is need for an evaluation method that gives the designer project specific feedback, and this already from the early design phase. The overall objective of this doctoral research concerns the development of a method that allows the evaluation of the energetic and comfort quality of the design during the design process and based on the limited number of available input parameters, gives from the very beginning of useful feedback to the designer.The DESUSA method should apply from the first sketch to the detailed design. This requires that the calculation module evolves with the design and is adapted to the available input data of the design at any given moment." "DR_SOM ANTWERP; international research seminar on methodology in design research" "Johan De Walsche" "Henry van de Velde" "DR_SOM (Design Research, Series on Method) is a series of international research seminars, exploring the development of valid methodologies in architectural design research. Through the analysis of best-practices, PhD-researchers and experts are brought together. The organization of the seminar in Antwerp is positioning the young research group Henry van de Velde as an active participant in the international research network ARENA." "Climate-proof through design. Research and design for climate adaptation in peri-urban territories." "Eva Kerselaers, Elke Rogge" "Rural Development, Social Sciences" "Main research question/goalIn this research by design, ILVO aims to support the elaboration of a strategy for the development of peri-urban areas. This strategy should address the numerous design challenges of these areas, of which climate adaptation is an important example. Various peri-urban case study areas in Flanders are selected for which exemplary spatial concepts are elaborated. These concepts take the recent transformations in the Flemish countryside (increase of land use for horses, private gardens, …) and the fundamental changes in agricultural management (scale enlargement, clustering, …) into account. The development of the scarce open space in Flanders is now hardly on the policy agenda. Scientifically supported spatial concepts can strategically support this development.Research approachResearch by design is actually “thinking through designing”. As such, research by design is used here as a method of testing, both for the current problems and opportunities and for the possible spatial concepts. Case study areas in Flanders are selected based on their spatial and agricultural differences.Relevance/ValorisationThis research project takes advantage of previous ILVO research results. The survey of transformations, which can be called “passive”,  is now used to perform an “active” design of peri-urban areas. This stimulates and broadens the debate on (climate adaptive) development of peri-urban areas in Flanders. The design exercise delivers a range of visual documents, sketches, maps, collages, etc. This graphical output can facilitate the dialogue between the actors involved and the policy makers." "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." "Deception by design. Characteristics and acceptability of research strategies that intentionally mislead research participants" "Pascal Borry" "Interfaculty Centre for Biomedical Ethics and Law, Parenting and Special Education, Uniwersytet Jagiellonski" "Research strategies that purposefully mislead research participants have been used for a long time. Although methodologies that use deception in their design could potentially increase relevant scientific knowledge in a huge number of areas, there is a lack of understanding about the conditions under which such a methodology is justified and a lack of clarity about what constitutes an appropriate context in which research participants can be deceived. Therefore, the use of deception in research studies has been heavily criticized because of ethical concerns regarding its use; because of the lack of proper informed consent and the fact of misleading the participant to the real purpose of the study. More recently, the development of the General Data Protection Regulation challenges the use of deception even more.Therefore, the general aims of our research are (a) to provide a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of research in which deception is being used, (b) to articulate more clearly conditions under such research is justified and (c) to develop ethical safeguards and conditions under which such a study could take place. The proposed research is important as there is a lack of understanding about the conditions under which deception in a research design might be justified and a lack of clarity about what constitutes an appropriate context in which research participants could potentially be deceived.This project will allow (1) to systematically identify research studies that used deception; (2) to investigate the experiences of researchers who have used a methodology in which deception was used; and (3) to systematically map research ethics guidelines and recommendations in order to analyse to what extent and the ways in which recommendations deal with the use of deception in research. The research activities developed in this proposal will lead to the development of further research activities in this area. The planned research activities and the active role of the research team in ethics committees will lead to the development of policy recommendation that will guide future research projects that want to integrate deception within the design of the study, and will provide useful instruments for research ethics committees to assess such research protocols." "Design of research, educational and communication strategy and activities with three field research stations" "Natalie BEENAERTS" "McGill University, Environmental Biology" "The Research Council of Hasselt University approved your application of a stay at Gault Field Station & Montana Field Station, Canada. During this stay, you will perform research in cooperation with prof. dr. David Maneli, Gault Field Station & Montana Field Station, Canada)." "A new look at estates: design research with a focus on shared ownership" "Glenn Deliège" "Futures through Design" "Within this research, we explore how fostering shared ownership through co-design can be a tool for returning estates to the center of cultural and material production. Indeed, co-design as a design methodology is highly suitable for mapping and activating the networks of human and non-human actors. Unfortunately, knowledge of and expertise in this method is still too fragmented across design disciplines. By having designers from landscape design, interior design and digital design work together within this research project, a unique opportunity arises to further build up this knowledge and expertise through the practical application on concrete estates. The research project thus aims to make a concrete contribution both to the revitalization of the 'estate model' and to a change in mentality in design practice, focusing more on (im)material, process-related results in terms of attitude and behavioral changes." "Research into a methodology for architects for the assessment and integration of sustainable use of materials from the early design." "Griet VERBEECK" ArcK "Research towards a methodology for architects to rate and Integrate durable use of materials early on in the design phase. A focus shift within the construction industry is slowly occurring, going from attention for energy performance of buildings in the user phase, to attention for the global environmental-impact of buildings during their entire life course. Herein, the use of materials plays an important role. Environmental-impact is often calculated using lifecycle analysis (LCA). However, existing calculation tools are often only usable to evaluate the performance of the building design afterwards, while from preceding studies the importance of the impact of early design decisions has been stated. At the building level, this calculation is still not very well known among architects (no legislation on the matter), and is also rather complex (plurality of materials, the unique design, ...). The current approach is therefore not tuned to the architect, even though he or she is the person responsible for the building design, and has a much larger impact on the building's final environmental impact (cf. The impact of the design on energyperformance). The aim of this PhD research is the development of an objective and scientifically based technology, able to estimate the durability of material use on building level, to give useable feedback on the expectable environmental impact early on in the design phase, and which is specifically aimed to be used by architects. The research will be split up in three phases, having each their own objective. The first phase aims for knowledge acquisition, divided into two partial research lines: 1) knowledge of the current and future (legislative) framework and the existing applications of LCA-related evaluation methods to determine the environmental impact of the materials in a building; 2) analyzing the current situation in the Flemish construction industry and more specifically, the knowledge, needs and wishes of the Flemish architects on sustainable use of materials and their expectations regarding a possible estimation of the environmental-impact. The second research phase aims to implement the foregoing insights to the development of a suitable calculation methodology. For this reason, there was chosen for a suitable LCA-calculation methodology (most preferred is this of the MMG-methodology). It will be examined to what extent this model can be modified to be used by an architect early on in the design phase. This way it will be investigated how the lack of information of one or more design parameters, that are only recorded later on in the design process, can be taken care of, eg. by using default solutions. These default solutions will be subjected to an uncertainty and sensitivity analysis to estimate their representativeness and accuracy. In addition, it is necessary to gain insight on the moments of the design process when feedback is necessary and desirable for the architect, and how this can/should be formulated. The objective of the third research phase is to test the preliminary calculation model and further tuning to the needs and wishes of the Flemish architect. This will be done using focus groups and testing panels, giving feedback on the different aspects of the usability, effectiveness and user-friendliness of the methodology, such as the manner and times they receive and/or expect feedback, the userinterface, the output formats, the input procedures, ... . In addition, the learning process that can be induced by an architect throughout different projects will be examined as well. There will also be thought about the possibilities for further software development (in collaboration with other researchers and computer scientists) echoing this dissertation. The acquisition of knowledge from the first research phase has been realized in the past year (since October the 1st 2013) Currently, there are discussions happening about a possible collaboration with OVAM and VITO." "Improving legibility research through parametric typeface design" "Ann BESSEMANS" "Centre for Statistics, Media, Arts and Design, IAUV University of Venice" "This project investigates how fonts can be parametrically decomposed, and how to employ this technique in the production of test materials within legibility research. Producing high-quality controlled font designs by means of parametric design allows future legibility research to better control two critical aspects of the experimental method: isolating causal factors and avoiding confounding variables. Legibility research has a wide range of important applications, such as effective signage, sensitive information on medical and food packaging, improving reading material for specific reading audiences (i.e., visually impaired readers, dyslexics). Yet current legibility research struggles with the question of exactly which typographic variables affect reading. Introducing design parameters that can be isolated and manipulated independently is the solution, but is often a timeconsuming task for designers and, above all, not for the scientist without design skills. This research hypothesizes that fonts can be designed parametrically in an accessible way by controlling them digitally (within a tool). Applying this technique within legibility research allows the impact of specific variables to be determined more precisely."