A practical approach to product design for future worlds using scenario-development

The focus of consumer product design is shifting from primarily offering functionality, towards\ud experience and emotion driven product characteristics [1]. At the same time the functioning of\ud products is more and more defined in its social context. Product designers can play a major role in\ud developing our future social context, as long as they are aware of the responsibility towards users,\ud society and environment. In the master ‘Design & Styling’ of the Industrial Design Engineering\ud program of the University of Twente, we created a course “Create the Future”, addressing both these\ud future- and society oriented aspects of design. In this paper we describe the course structure and the\ud associated teaching methods, give examples of student results and discuss the points of interest and\ud application possibilities. In the 2008 edition the students explored the future of food. First the students\ud created a future context by investigating, building and visualizing multiple scenarios. Subsequently\ud they designed a future product concept within these scenario contexts. It showed that the structure of\ud this course was particularly suitable for designing products for the not so near future, i.e. 15-20 years\ud ahead. Especially scenario development proved to be a good instrument for the students to be able to\ud create a tangible context for designing future products and services

Has the study of philosophy at Dutch universities changed under economic and political pressures?

From 1980 until 1985, the Dutch Faculties of Philosophy went through a period of transition. First, in 1982 the national government introduced a new system of financing research at the universities. This was essentially based on the natural sciences and did not match philosophers' work organization. In 1983 a drastic reduction in the budget for philosophy was proposed within the framework of a policy of introducing savings by distributing tasks among the universities. Recently, a visiting committee reported on the weak and strong areas of Dutch philosophy and proposed a policy to strengthen Dutch philosophy. This study explores the effects of the institutional reorganizations on the study of philosophy at the faculties, using scientometric methods. In addition to presenting empirical results, some methodological questions concerning the application of scientometric methods to a field of the humanities will be discussed. The number of publications went up as funding was cut back and different subfields made different kinds of changes in orientation. The results show the relevance of publication-based data in research evaluation

Strategic boundary management in university-based living labs

University-based boundary organisations provide academics with an environment where they can interact with a wide variety of societal partners to produce knowledge and work on research projects, often of a transdisciplinary nature. This environment, however, implies that their researchers may be confronted with multiple and sometimes conflicting demands coming from various stakeholders. In this study, we focus on one such case, a Real-world Laboratory (RwL), set up by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. This RwL focuses on urban sustainable development challenges. Drawing on boundary work literature, we analyse the boundary work strategies employed by the lab's leading researchers to manage such demands as part of a RwL research project. We observe that the managing researchers buffer several types of boundaries in order not to compromise the transdisciplinary nature of the RwL. They appear to utilise four types of boundary devices when managing boundaries: language, people, objects, and spaces. We conclude that, to reduce tensions, the managing researchers should acknowledge the presence of boundaries early on in their RwL research project, that is, during its conception phase.</p

Political and social forces shaping political science research and knowledge transfer in the Netherlands

The authors identify a third type of relevance that sits between the scholar-selected and state-directed poles that were identified in the opening chapter. This "middle position" is that of the pragmatic scholar seeking windows for narrowing funding possibilities of fundamental research, at the same time engaging freely with the potential research users that are the targets of impact. This type, referred to as "entrepreneurial relevance, seems to represent some of the key features of the Dutch context-such as the country's pragmatic and consensus-building political and social culture-, and it also matches findings on the advisory roles of political scientists".</p