Implications of Social Practice Theory for Sustainable Design

Sustainable design faces challenges at a scale and level of complexity that are ill at ease with design’s mainstream focus on products and users. Recently, social practice theory has been suggested as a promising theoretical framework to inform new ways of designing. In social practice theory, practices – socially shared entities such as...

Sustainable Food by Design: Co-design and Sustainable Consumption Among the Urban Middle Class of Vietnam

Growing unsustainable consumption in Vietnam is a pressing issue, especially in urban areas. The effects of rapid economic growth, industrialization and increasing wealth in combination with a young, growing population makes that the middle class of Vietnam is on the rise. This movement within the population is making room to form and introduce...

Learning from co-housing initiatives: Between Passivhaus engineers and active inhabitants

Following the UN world summits on Climate Change (Paris 2015) and Habitat (Quito 2016), most European cities assume an active role to implement internationally agreed goals related to climate change, translated in the so-called New Urban Agenda. At the same time, the urban housing market is increasingly inaccessible for low- and middle-income...

University Campuses in Saudi Arabia: Sustainability Challenges and Potential Solutions

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has experienced a huge investment from the government in many sectors such as health, education, infrastructure, and so on. A special focus has been given to the higher education sector. This is because education, and higher education in particular, is key for the development of any country. To realise this, the...

Design for Managing Obsolescence: A Design Methodology for Preserving Product Integrity in a Circular Economy

This thesis argues that in order to increase the likelihood that product lifetime extension in a circular economy will be successful from both an environmental and an economic perspective, industrial designers need to be able to control not only the spatial dimension (materialization and geometry) of products, but also their temporal dimension....

Sustainable High-rises: Design Strategies for Energy-efficient and Comfortable Tall Office Buildings in Various Climates

With the aim to limit the number of ineffective designs, this dissertation has investigated the impact of architectural design strategies on improving the energy performance of and thermal comfort in high-rise office buildings in temperate, sub-tropical and tropical climates. As the starting-point of this research, a comparative study between...

Elephants in the Boardroom?: Sustainable values-based strategic decision-making in a Dutch housing association

The central research question in this study is: Which meaning is given to sustainability within a Dutch housing association and does making sense of the concept of sustainability lead to sustainable strategic choices? The chosen research strategy is a longitudinal case study in the Dutch housing association Welbions. Data was collected in three...

Just Energy? Designing for Ethical Acceptability in Smart Grids

Smart grids within the transition to sustainable energy systems Smart grid systems are widely considered as crucial in the energy transition, because they allow for greater flexibility in bridging temporal gaps between electricity supply and demand in renewable energy systems. To do so, the systems make use of information and communication...

Investigation of limestone-calcined clay-based cementitious materials for sustainable 3d concrete printing

Extrusion-based 3D concrete printing (3DCP), as one of the emerging techniques, has received considerable attention from both academia and industry, due to its numerous benefits for concrete construction, through enhancing the freedom of architectural design, eliminating formwork, optimizing material use, and decreasing wastes, labors and costs....

From surgical waste to medical products

Hospital waste has a major impact on the environment. The worldwide growth of hospital waste is the result of the growing world population and the increase in use of disposables. A circular healthcare economy may contribute to the reduction of hospital waste. The circular economy is a system in which waste is prevented and where waste is reused....

Architectural Photovoltaic Application

Today, photovoltaic technology is one of the fastest-growing fields of technology and is becoming the lowest-cost option for electricity generation in the greatest part of the world. Based on IEA projection, the number of households relying on solar PV grows from today’s 25 million to more than 100 million by 2030. Based on this projection, we...