Background This research study applied the 'Integrated Energy Landscape Approach and the Ecosystem Services Framework' to formulate a pre-proposal for a Positive Energy District in the Hoogkerk Zuid neighborhood in Groningen, the Netherlands. Results The proposed energy saving and energy generation interventions …

Like a marker pen on a map, the Covid-19 pandemic drastically highlighted the persisting existence of borders that used to play an ever decreasing role in people´s perception and behavior over the last decades. Yes, inner European borders are open in normal times. Yes, people, goods, services and ideas …

Societal transitions require activities of multiple stakeholders on different systemic levels. Designers and design researchers are often involved in supporting specific interventions and sometimes in enabling and facilitating entire processes. Practices and literature in ‘co-creation ecosystems’ are …

Living labs are an extremely attractive open innovation landscape for collaborative research and development activities targeting the complexity of today’s societal challenges. However, although there is plenty of support for collaboration, we still lack clear guidelines to direct transdisciplinary stakeholder …

Our planet’s ecology and society are on a collision course, which manifests due to a contradiction in the assumptions of unlimited material growth fueling the linear economic paradigm. Our closed planetary ecosystem imposes confined amounts of space and a finite extent of resources upon its inhabitants. …

Change agent capacity-building compendium.Due to increasing globalization, technological advances and sociological changes, the world is becoming more complex than ever. Complexity has gone from large systems, to organizational and individual levels. Today it concerns all aspects of society. The will …

The ever increasing technological developments and greater demands from our society for qualitative better, safer, sustainable products, processes and systems are pushing the boundaries of what is possible from an engineer’s perspective. Besides the (local) grand challenges in energy, sustainability, …