Active8-Planet Challenge Introductions
Hasselt University: Circular façade
Why?
A façade is the outside or all of the external faces of a building. Along with the roof, it is one of the most important elements of a building, since it acts as the primary barrier against external weather and climate elements. People link a façade with something that only adds to the aesthetic factor of a building structure, but the potential of a façade in architecture is much more than that. Buildings are responsible for almost 40% of global carbon emissions and 50% of global material use. Façades can play a key role in the transformation to a sustainable built environment.
What?
In our research we want to understand the role of a façade in generating a positive impact on future society, both social and ecological, on the local scale but also on a global scale, including its economic feasibility.
How?
So how can we design façades that tackle global warming, health and wellbeing, and resource impacts to deliver quality infrastructure — a critical need for our planet and communities. Students from the departments of architecture, industrial engineering and economics will team up with our engineering partner Huygen to investigate how we can create this façade system. We start from the existing Webo façade panel: how circular is it now, what elements can be added or need to be transformed. We will be using the Active8-Planet matrix as a guiding tool to generate a wide perspective on this challenge. We will also explore the influence of business models in supporting this goal.
Halmstad University: Who will own your mobility experience in a circular economy?
Why?
There is an urgent, unequivocal need for climate action, and one important aspect where we need to make a change is mobility. From a sustainability perspective, shared and combined ownership is a reasonable direction, but it is not clear what the experience of ownership will look like. At the same time, we are more mobile than ever before, and the pandemic has taught us that many jobs can be performed from any location. Yet, as the world opens up more, it is also important to better understand how mobility can be made more sustainable so that we can harness the benefits of the increasing mobility. Therefore, this challenge deals with ownership of mobility in a circular economy.
What?
The aim is to better understand how mobility ownership in a circular economy can look like in the future, and what challenges there are to sustainable mobility. The main focus is on qualitative insights into the experience of mobility, as well as a critical perspective of future possibilities. The perspective is strategic, and the contribution is relevant for anyone researching or designing mobility experiences.
How?
Together in a team with Volvo Cars, four students from the Digital design and innovation bachelor program and researchers in informatics and design, we will try to understand the challenge of creating a new, sustainable mobility experience. The team will perform workshops and interviews with different stakeholders, such as employees at Volvo Cars, citizens in various Swedish cities (such as Halmstad, Helsingborg and Göteborg). The team will also work with critical techniques such as design fiction and critical design, and create and evaluate prototypes in order to better understand the possibilities for sustainable mobility and ownership in a circular economy.
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: Healthy Healthcare Environment
Why?
Healthcare facilities should have the healthiest environments in the world. When we are faced with health issues, we can use all the help we can get. Healthcare professionals in The Netherlands are equipped with high tech equipment and educated insights to help their patients. Their patients however, might experience their care differently depending on the environment. For this reason, the healthcare organization we have partnered with would like to learn how their beautiful, old, low-ceilinged, rented building is experienced by their patients.
What?
After a few months of data gathering, we will align, analyze and interpret the quantitative and qualitative results to discover new insights into the meaning of a healthy environment. Together with all the different stakeholders, we will design interventions to boost the quality of the patient and staff experience in these environments. We expect these insights and interventions to not only be relevant to our specific research location, but also to other healthcare facilities that are dealing with similar challenges.
How?
What does a healthy environment look and feel like? And to whom? To answer such questions, this challenge zooms in on the experiences and perspectives of both patients and care professionals in a mental healthcare facility in Amsterdam. Four students will conduct ethnographic research at this facility to gain qualitative insights in the effect of environment. At the same time our engineering partner Huygen will collect quantitative data in these same environments.
University of Ljubljana: Mobility as a service
Why?
As we move towards a (more) sustainable future, we must not only question the “big picture” and current political and economic systems, but also rethink our daily practices and how we live our lives on a much more mundane and smaller scale. In a very literal sense, the way we live our daily lives is also related to how we move from one place to another, from our homes to the office, to the mall, to our friends’ houses or to the airport. Especially in urban areas, the mobility flows created by our daily movements bring many challenges, from spatial issues to air quality. In general, people only use their own cars about five percent of the time, while for the remaining 95%, the vehicles are immobile. We believe it is time to challenge this and think of mobility not just in terms of cars, buses, trains, or planes, but in terms of services.
What?
The main goal of our short ethnographic research is to understand the pull and push factors in the decision to use car sharing services in Ljubljana. We want to use our horizontal findings on why people choose to use or not to use a car sharing service for further steps in the development of the service and the mobile application.
How?
To understand how people think about and practice mobility, we will approach our research horizontally, starting by asking very general questions, such as What is mobility? Why do people want to own a car – and why they don’t? Is there a growing number of people who do not own a car?
The collaboration between a team of anthropologists and the developers of a car sharing platform/app will take a very interdisciplinary approach, looking for new ways to combine qualitative and quantitative research approaches, and how to combine Big Data and Thick Data to deepen the research findings.