Towards strengthening Methods in Design Education and Practice

Design skills and methods have been at the conceptual foundation of the design discipline(s) for at least the past half century. Over this period, design has also changed, focusing on new outcomes, serving new goals, and addressing different scales and broader application areas. On the one hand, there is a large set of methods and tools; on the...

Air Safety Investigation: The Journey

"Air Safety Investigation – The Journey" is an introductory book that explores the world of air safety investigation. Unlike a how-to manual for investigating aviation accidents, this book focuses on the essential knowledge and mindset required to conduct a safety investigation. It covers the various phases of an investigation, from gathering...

Technology as Driver for Morally Motivated Conceptual Engineering

New technologies are the source of uncertainties about the applicability of moral and morally connotated concepts. These uncertainties sometimes call for conceptual engineering, but it is not often recognized when this is the case. We take this to be a missed opportunity, as a recognition that different researchers are working on the same kind...

Planning as Critical Engaged Practice: Consequences for Studio Education.

Space, people, and time are all intertwined in the city, a complex system in which planners intervene. Their strategic plans and neighbourhood designs impact the daily lives of city dwellers. This emphasises the point that spatial planning and urban design ar enot technical disciplines. The everyday use of space and its symbolic meanings must be...

Feeling and thinking on social media: emotions, affective scaffolding, and critical thinking

It is often suggested that social media is a hostile environment for critical thinking and that a major source for epistemic problems concerning social media is that it facilitates emotions. We argue that emotions per se are not the source of the epistemic problems concerning social media. We propose that instead of focusing on emotions, we...

Self-Trust and Critical Thinking Online: A Relational Account

An increasingly popular solution to the anti-scientific climate rising on social media platforms has been the appeal to more critical thinking from the user’s side. In this paper, we zoom in on the ideal of critical thinking and unpack it in order to see, specifically, whether it can provide enough epistemic agency so that users endowed with it...

Learning to Reframe Problems Through Moral Sensitivity and Critical Thinking in Environmental Ethics for Engineers

As attention to the pervasiveness and severity of environmental challenges grows, technical universities are responding to the need to include environmental topics in engineering curricula and to equip engineering students, without training in ethics, to understand and respond to the complex social and normative demands of these issues. But as...

Promoting Children's Critical Thinking Towards Robotics through Robot Deception

The need for critically reflecting on the deceptive nature of advanced technologies, such as social robots, is urging academia and civil society to rethink education and the skills needed by future generations. The promotion of critical thinking, however, remains largely unaddressed within the field of educational robotics. To address this...

Twisted thinking: Technology, values and critical thinking

Technology should be aligned with our values. We make the case that attempts to align emerging technologies with our values should reflect critically on these values. Critical thinking seems like a natural starting point for the critical assessment of our values. However, extant conceptualizations of critical thinking carve out no space for the...

Pop your Bubble: A Lesson Plan for Teenagers to Rethink their online Filter Bubbles

This graduation thesis report describes the research activities investigating the education on filter bubbles in Dutch secondary schools towards teenagers between 14-16 years old, and the design to improve this through including critical thinking techniques. <br/>During this research the context and two main target groups were explored through...

A Digital Picture to Hold Us Captive?: A Flusserian Interpretation of Misinformation Sharing on Social Media

In this article I investigate online misinformation from a media philosophy perspective. I, thus move away from the debate focused on the semantic content, concerned with what is true or not about misinformation. I argue rather that online misinformation is the effect of an informational climate promoted by user micro-behaviours such as liking,...

Ethical reflection or critical thinking? Overlapping competencies in engineering ethics education

Ethical reflection is considered to be an important competency for engineering ethics education. However it has no clear definition, which makes it difficult to effectively incorporate it into engineering ethics education. This paper proposes an operationalisation of ethical reflection into four learning goals which can help educators explicitly...

How to Think Critically about the Common Past?: On the Feeling of Communism Nostalgia in Post-Revolutionary Romania

This article proposes a phenomenological interpretation of nostalgia for communism, a collective feeling expressed typically in most Eastern European countries after the official fall of the communist regimes. While nostalgia for communism may seem like a paradoxical feeling, a sort of Stockholm syndrome at a collective level, this article...

Teaching critical thinking through argument mapping

During this project we have created a product for the company FeedbackFruits to promote critical thinking in education. Research has shown that argument mapping is a promising method to promote critical thinking. Several existing related platforms were analyzed to draw lessons from their experience. Literature research revealed that product...

Hands on Workshop on Teaching Forensic Engineering Teaching Students Critical Thinking by Investigative mindset

When teaching Engineering to students it is important that we not only teach about<br/>how to engineer new things but also look at the failures and performance problems<br/>from an engineering point-of-view. The field that studies this part of engineering is<br/>known as Forensic Engineering. The American Society of Civil Engineers defines this...