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Energy-efficiency is at the forefront of modern office renovations, but this often comes at the cost of comfort. So doctoral candidate Minyoung Kwon has turned things around: start by looking at the wishes of the users before you design their workplace. This does not necessarily have to result in higher energy consumption.

The small white building was designed as part of a two-year research project, built by students and meant to be learned from. The Product Development Test Lab has now found a new location at The Green Village on the TU Delft campus, where product innovations focused on digital construction, the circular economy and energy saving can be further tested.

Areas around cities are often referred to negatively with the term 'urban sprawl'. But it is precisely in these territories in-between that we can achieve many of our sustainability goals, says PhD researcher Alexander Wandl. We just have to learn to plan them better.

The design ‘Building Upon Brainpark’ proposes to revitalise the Brainpark area in Rotterdam by making the area more visible to local residents and users of the location. The design by BK alumni Kevin Westerveld, Nima Morkoç, Hedwig van der Linden, and master student Lars Kloeg was selected as a special mention in the Europan 15 x Productive Rotterdam design competition.

New Horizon 2020 project UPLIFT aims to provide insight into the structural drivers of intergenerational inequalities within the European Union, focusing on vulnerable young people. Researchers from Management in the Built Environment will coordinate the participatory action research, involving the young people themselves to develop innovative policy solutions.

Residential comfort tends to be associated with pleasant temperatures, but there’s much more to it than that. PhD researcher Marco Ortiz identified the living conditions we experience as pleasant and used this research to draw up psychological profiles that can be used to design comfortable, energy-efficient houses tailored to the users’ preferences.

The new consortium IEBB stands for integrated energy transition for existing buildings and has received a 13,8 million euro grant to develop affordable and user-friendly renovation concepts in the coming years. Researchers from the faculties of Architecture and the Built Environment, Industrial Design Engineering and Applied Sciences at TU Delft are developing the necessary knowledge for, amongst others, innovative renovation concepts, digitisation of the renovation process, optimisation of heat pumps and energy performance of buildings, chain innovation and implementation.

Storage facilities of museums house over 90% of the collections of most museums. The project ‘DIPOT: Digital depot’ explores how these spaces can be made accessible through VR technologies. This would help not only to open up the collection to a broader public, but also to improve the design of future museums’ storage facilities.

Mary Lou van den Berg received the NRP Master Award for her thesis on adaptive reuse of shared heritage in the city centre of Bandung, Indonesia. The second and third prizes were received by BK alumni Ditte Gerding and Tessa Persoon, respectively.

What is the most effective way for an organisation to make decisions about real estate that best match the organisation’s needs? Monique Arkesteijn investigated existing methods and developed a model in which stakeholders’ preferences lead to the best option. Her research offers corporate real estate (CRE) managers a fresh approach to decision-making.