Design for Values Symposium

On the occasion of its Dies Natalis celebration, the Delft University of Technology together with the Delft Design for Values Institute has organised a symposium on Design for Values.

Design for Values means making design choices with explicit reference to and for reasons of moral and social values throughout the entire design or engineering process. The symposium centers around research supporting design for values, with a focus on Value Dynamics (how to design for values that change over time) and Value Conflicts (how to deal with frictions that emerge between two or more values within design and engineering processes).
Continue reading

Architectural and Urban Design for Values

In a Dies Satellite Event celebrating the 178th anniversary of the TU Delft, the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment introduces their collaborative research on values to a wider audience, as it is present and emerging within its rich set of disciplines, including architectural and urban design, building technology, process management, and geo-information science. The faculty answers on the questions: How to deal with value dynamics when designing for values? How can we successfully operationalise values to inform design decisions, whilst anticipating possible value changes? How does the theory apply to specific application areas, such as architecture and urban design?
Continue reading

Resilient Communities | Community Resilience

Short keynote and debate exploring both the idea of resilient communities as well as of community resilience(s). Whereas sociological resilience is defined as the ability to recover from change, alike ecological resilience and technological resilience, community resilience applies to the ability of a specific community to maintain a healthy state in response to similar destabilising influences. This presumes a few simple subsets of abilities, which have been explained during the Peccioli Conferenza. If we know what are community resiliencies, we may know what are resilient communities. Particularly this, more so improving such resiliencies, may be seen as an investment in the human capital.


Peccioli Conferenza, spazi di Fonte Mazzola, 4 November 2019

Conversations in the Anthropocene

Introducing the Anthropocene
Colin Waters is Secretary of the Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, the body investigating the Anthropocene as a potential geological time unit. His working group is putting forward a proposal towards the recognition of the proposed new epoch. They started in 2009 and up until last year, they were pulling together all information that was available. “For example the biological changes that have happened are irreversible. Once species are transferred across the planet, you can’t put them in a box and put them back in their indigenous state”, he has explained while being our guest in Delft: “Even things like carbon dioxide, this will last as a signal for thousands of years. Even if we are reducing our carbon emission immediately, we are still looking at emissions which are going to be elevated above natural levels for thousands of years. At the present, there is no indication that we are changing that trend.” The human impact may be like a meteorite impact. At the end of the Cretaceous Period when the dinosaurs became extinct, a spike of iridium (an extra-terrestrial element) changed the conditions on Earth. “You still find a layer of a few millimeters thick which is high in iridium, and we can use that as the basis of the start of the new Paleogene Period following the Cretaceous.” It has been “a state change, a game-changer, to a state which now is very different from what it was before and is not recreatable to a large extent either.” What is our share, as designers?

Architecture is perhaps one that we have not mined sufficiently in the past that can provide information that is new to us and help build the story that we are developing. – Colin Waters

Continue reading

Towards the Edge of The Anthropocene

A new era is upon us. For centuries mankind has sought to gain control over the world we live in. Now we are moving towards the end of a world defined by nature and the dawn of an age dominated by the human condition. The Anthropocene is coming and it is our turn to choose sides. More technology or more democracy? Social justice or environmental accountability? Further or no further?


Towards the Edge of The Anthropocene: [no]Further. Trailer, published by ‘Urban Landscape’ on YouTube

Coming soon! 16-19 October 2017