Celebrating 4 successful years of the Pride & Prejudice programme

The goal of the Pride & Prejudice programme was to have a positive impact on our lifestyle by changing our habits in physical activity and diet. It aimed to generate new scientific knowledge and innovative technology. By creating, for example, new frameworks for behavioural change; systems to remotely monitor health parameters and behaviour; and design approaches to develop interventions that persuade people to make healthy choices about what they eat and to what extent they are physically active, in order to adopt a healthier lifestyle.

IDE researchers involved in this project included Associate Professor Rick Schifferstein, Assistant Professor Jos Kraal, Assistant Professor Marine Bos-de Vos, as well as, former IDE researchers Mailin Lemke, Boudewijn Boon, and Niko Vegt.

Within the Pride and Prejudice programme, Rick Schifferstein looked for ways to employ negative emotions like shame and disgust to improve consumers’ eating behaviour. “We created a consortium made up of all kinds of people from relevant disciplines, ranging from researchers and designers to technicians and marketers. We thought it would be a good idea to unite all the relevant worlds, exactly in line with 4TU’s philosophy of looking beyond your own borders.”

Jos Kraal organised education on motivation and behaviour for IDE students. He also collaborated in the Explorative Self Experimentation project. “The problem is that people rarely think about why they failed to make a change. What actually went wrong? Why didn’t it work? Why doesn’t the approach I chose to help me live a healthier life work for me? Questions like this are key to Explorative Self Experimentation. It focuses on what suits the individual. What does he/she want? How would he/she prefer to work on the problem? And is the person being honest about what he/she really wants to achieve?”

Marina Bos-de Vos collaborated in and coordinated the development of a concept for a meaningful Digital Twin in pregnancy care, including the development of a provocative prototype. She also did research into how Digital Twin users would prefer to distribute autonomy among AI, patient, and care provider in high-risk and low-risk situations. Marina: “What you primarily see with twins, regardless of the sector, is that data is the central focus. This is positive, of course, as the more data you have and the more reliable it is, the better insights you are able to gain. But our concern is that the human drivers behind the use of digital twins have hardly been taken into account. How do people experience digital twins? What aspects do they like? What needs do they have? And how can we respond to these needs? These are the kinds of questions that were of interest to us and that were central in our development of the ‘provotype’ of the twin.

This programme ran for four years. It was a 4TU.Federation cooperation between TU Eindhoven, Wageningen University, and TU Delft IDE.