Educational framework

Not only within the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, but throughout Delft University of Technology, the City of the Future Graduation Lab proves to have a truly unique position. It is a laboratory where students are challenged to think beyond their own discipline, creating an interdisciplinary synergy between different fields...

City of the Future Graduation Lab: Experiences in Multidisciplinary Education

The Cross Domain City of the Future Graduation Lab, situated in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft, has been a pioneer in experimenting with a multidisciplinary approach to education on the built environment. Drawing upon this expertise over the past years, this book reflects on multidisciplinarity in the built...

Functional Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biologists have made great progress over the past decade in developing methods for modular assembly of genetic sequences and in engineering biological systems with a wide variety of functions in various contexts and organisms. However, current paradigms in the field entangle sequence and functionality in a manner that makes...

Engineering Systems Design: A Look to the Future

Engineering Systems Design is an emerging perspective with a growing community. The preceding chapters in the Handbook of Engineering Systems Design presented the engineering systems perspective, models for describing and methods for designing interventions in engineering systems, as well as reflections on the use of those methods and upcoming...

Improving the performance of civil engineering projects through the integrated design process

Purpose: Civil engineering projects around the world have been underperforming for a long time. While the complexity of these projects will continue to increase, there is an urgent need to perform better. Although the integrated design process is critical for project success, the literature lacks studies describing the link to project...

Fabrication and Design of Wood-Based High-Performance Composites

Delignified densified wood is a new promising and sustainable material that possesses the potential to replace synthetic materials, such as glass fiber reinforced composites, due to its excellent mechanical properties. Delignified wood, however, is rather fragile in a wet state, which makes handling and shaping challenging. Here we present...

Empowering through reflection: participatory design of change in agricultural chains in Indonesia by local stakeholders

Participation of local actors has shown to be of significant importance to the uptake of new approaches to agricultural initiatives in developing countries. This paper proposes a new approach to empower local chain actors to work together to understand their own and others’ challenges, to pursue common understanding of their situations and...

Designing context-aware systems: A method for understanding and analysing context in practice

Context-aware systems are systems that have the ability to sense and adapt to the environment. To operate in large-scale multi-stakeholder environments, systems often require context awareness. The context elements that systems in such environments should take into account are becoming ever more complex and go beyond elements like geographic...

Safe-by-Design: from Safety to Responsibility

Safe-by-design (SbD) aims at addressing safety issues already during the R&D and design phases of new technologies. SbD has increasingly become popular in the last few years for addressing the risks of emerging technologies like nanotechnology and synthetic biology. We ask to what extent SbD approaches can deal with uncertainty, in...

Functional requirements for a software cost database

Cost estimation of software development and control of the cost during the development, are difficult due to the lack of useful cost figures from previous projects, and consequently due to the lack of an accurate cost estimation and management method. This report describes the results of the first phase of a study to develop a software cost...