Transformative Emergence: Research Challenges for Enabling Social-ecological Tipping Points Toward Regional Sustainability Transformations

A crucial task to accelerate global decarbonisation is to understand how to enable fast, equitable, low-carbon transformations in Coal and Carbon Intensive Regions (CCIRs). In this early literature review we underlined the relevance of the boundary concept of social-ecological tipping points (SETPs) and showed that the research and policy...

Social Responsibility in Research Practice: Engaging applied scientists with the socio-ethical context of their work

How to encourage researchers to critically reflect on the ethical and social dimensions of their work? That is the central research question of this thesis. It starts from the assumption that the neutrality view of the social responsibility of the researcher – the view that researchers have no business with the social and ethical dimensions of...

Achieving Sustainable Rural Water Services in Uganda: Collaborative Model-based Policy Analysis for Collective Reflection and Action

In this empirically-driven, practice oriented research, the rural water sector in sub-Saharan Africa is examined from a systems perspective. In the face of rapidly changing and uncertain futures, the need for policy makers and practitioners to identify and respond to the multiple, seemingly intractable problems that give rise to stagnating water...

A novel coastal landscape model for sandy systems: Community base for interdisciplinary research on coastal evolution

A common measure to mitigate erosion along sandy beaches is the implementation of sand nourishments. The design and societal acceptance of such a soft mitigation measure demands information on the expected evolution at various time scales ranging from a storm event to multiple decades. Process-based morphodynamic models are increasingly applied...

Manifesto for Digital Social Touch in Crisis

This qualitative exploratory research paper presents a Manifesto for Digital Social Touch in Crisis - a provocative call to action to designers, developers and researchers to rethink and reimagine social touch through a deeper engagement with the social and sensory aspects of touch. This call is motivated by concerns that social touch is in a...

A provocative call to engage with social and sensory aspects of touch

The social and sensory aspects of touch are critical for human communication, yet the challenges of haptic technology development and a focus on the technological means that digital touch communication often fails to realise the potential and promise of touch. The Manifesto for Digital Social Touch in Crisis responds to this through a call to...

A new social way of living in building design

Often, the current housing stock does not address problems of social isolation at this moment in time. For example, dwellings are designed as interior spaces and the route towards the home is often an unpleasant and boring one. It is important for architects and designers to have positive impulses and guidelines to address these problems. To...