Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Adaptive Reuse of Heritage: towards an integrated evaluation framework" "Koenraad VAN CLEEMPOEL" ArcK "The adaptive reuse of heritage – altering existing buildings for new or continuous use – is an important conservational, architectural, and urban strategy today. It is a complex task which, besides practical and technical aspects, includes a process of re-evaluation in which a new balance must be found between different sorts of values, moving from historical and conservational values towards architectural, societal, and economical values. As the existing evaluation frameworks for adaptive reuse are mainly directed towards historic values, this project aims to develop a more holistic and integrated evaluation framework. Rather than freezing a building's historic fabric, this project proposes the ambitious idea that the heyday of a monument or site may also lie in the future. This project focuses on immovable heritage policy in Flanders and Wallonia as to adaptive reuse of heritage buildings and sites. It includes an analysis of current policy and adaptive reuse practice in both regions through literature study, interviews, and case study research. Moreover, the developed evaluation framework will be tested through research-by-design. The project is a collaboration between Hasselt University and the University of Liège." "Lost in Representation: Investigating the Material Agency of Media in the Architectural Design Process." "Lara Schrijver" "Henry van de Velde" "The research project departs from the observation that the invention of new types of media for architectural representation in history coincides with developments in architectural paradigms and styles at the time. The project proposes to examine this apparent relationship by (1) developing an original contribution to architectural history through the analysis of six case studies and (2) by building a conceptual framework within which to understand the active role these media have in the formation of ideas, designs, and knowledge, focused on the material qualities of these media. The research will study (1) the transformation of military cartography into architectural drawings in 17th century France, in relation with the advent of geometrical landscape design; (2) the commercialisation of tracing paper in 18th century Central-Europe, in relation with the rise of eclecticism in architecture, (3) the adoption of casts and moulds as a means of studying architecture in 19th century Western Europe, in relation with an accelerated development of architectural eclecticism, (4) the commercialisation of photography at the turn of the century, in relation with the modernist avant-garde, (5) the use of collage in architectural practice of the midtwentieth century, coinciding with a visionary, speculative architecture, (6) the implementation of Computer Aided Drawing in architectural practice by the end of 20th century, in relation to parametric design." "15th Participatory Design Conference. PARTICIPATORY DESIGN, DEMOCRACY AND POLITICS" "Liesbeth HUYBRECHTS" ArcK "PDC has a long history in PD research that contributes to societal issues and democratic processes. Considering our whole surroundings are designed, PDC has a democratic aim for design researchers to involve people who are non-designers in forming their environment. PDC 2018 has three objectives: First, PDC 2018 aims to foreground democracy and politics as historically and contemporary important topics in the PD community. This specific thematic focus is timely and relevant because of the changing local and European political landscape. These changes raise attention to give form to tools, spaces and displays that allow citizens to take part in the political landscape and democratic processes in relation to their environment. Considering the societal relevance of the PDC 2018 theme, we want to raise the attention of the research community, politicians and news media for the conference. Second, the local organisers of the conference aim to increase network opportunities for Flemish universities and by extension the Low Countries. The researchers that are part of the organising committee can strengthen local collaboration in areas related to PD and increase their visibility on an international level. The geographical situation also creates an opportunity for the broader PDC community to reach new local communities in the Benelux. Third, by bringing PDC to Belgium, the local academic institutes aim to establish their research position within the PDC community. Scandinavia, UK and USA were core contexts for the previous PDC editions since they have a long history and reputation in foregrounding design as research addressing societal themes. The Belgian research groups have been building on their academic reputation in the PD fiêld in the past ten years. PDC 2018 will set a different tone than the previous editions, highlighting the particularity of the local PD community within the international established PDC community." "RETAX - Rethinking Real Estate Taxation in Flanders" ArcK "The RETAX project addresses one of the most critical and long-lasting issues in real estate taxation in Flanders: the reevaluation of the cadastral income (CI). The CI is an estimate of the rental value of a property and serves as the base of the property tax. The tax code states that the CI should be revised every ten years. Despite the initial intention to do so, they have never received an update since their first valuation in 1975. The growing discrepancy between the CI and the actual market rent causes several distortions and leads to inequitable situations in which tax payers enjoying similar housing services are taxed differently. Although the lack of a proper reevaluation is the most pressing issue for the Flemish property tax, the OECD and others also point to the design of the property tax as an important opportunity to increase economic efficiency of the tax. The lack of attention for its design is a second reason why this instrument is underutilized in many countries, despite the fact that it could be an important source of revenue. Therefore, the first objective is to study the optimal design of the property tax. This objective gathers all questions related to both theoretical and practical issues with regard to the composition of the tax base. Furthermore, we will look how we can adjust the design in order to support the long-term policy objectives from the Flemish government like increasing the energy-efficiency of the housing stock and stimulating sustainable land use. The second objective is to develop econometric models that can estimate the new tax base and allow a regular reevaluation in a cost effective manner. Since every property has its own CI, every household is affected by the inequity and the distortionary effects of the current system that was adjusted for the last time more than 4 decades ago. Therefore, a transition from the outdated CI to a new tax base will affect every homeowner, landlord and tenant in Flanders for decades to come." "International co-ordination action: EIDD - Design for All Academic Newtork (DfA ACANET)" "Jasmien HERSSENS" "Media, Arts and Design, ArcK" "EIDD-Design for All Europe (www.dfaeurope.eu) is an independent European Institute established in Dublin in 1993 that connects organisations and networks working on the topic of Design for All. Design for All (DfA), Universal Design (UD) or Inclusive Design (ID) are three synonyms for a design strategy defined in the '70s by Ron Mace. This strategy states that everything that we design has to support users in a positive, elegant way and so that users don't need to adapt themselves to these designed products, services or environments. On the contrary, the designed environment supports the diversity of people in the best possible sense without stigmatising anyone. This DfA-design strategy is scientifically outlined and can be very effective and innovative in terms of diversity and inclusion and is thus an effective strategy for innovation across all sectors that benefits society, business and the individual at the same time (Eikhaug, 2010 ). However, it is still very unknown and unfamiliar to business, government, users, educator and scientists. Therefore, the 3 main scientific goals of this 'Design for All Academic Network (DfA ACANET)' are (1) to connect research and researchers from interdisciplinary organisations (eg. academia, education, design institutes, business, government, user organisations) in order to (2) incubate and (3) disseminate knowledge and science in DfA." "Building Capacity to transform existing residential subdivisions into smart and robust urban ecosystems" "Oswald DEVISCH" ArcK "Developing smart and sustainable transformation pathways requires technical and conceptual innovation. The project CAPA.CITY starts from the hypothesis that these innovations can only be implemented in a durable way if they are supported by a process of capacity building. The main objective of CAPA.CITY is therefor to develop a theoretical and operational framework that can help the building of the, so-called, collective capabilities that are necessary to create smart and robust urban ecosystems. Collective capabilities refer to the ability of a collective - consisting of citizens, businesses, NGO's and institutes- to meet a set of predefined objectives. The point of departure is that building these capabilities is a process of joint learning. For this reason, CAPA.CITY proposes to experiment with location-based experiential learning methods to trigger this process. Given that joint learning is context-dependent, CAPA.CITY proposes to work within one urban context, namely the retrofitting of existing residential subdivisions. CAPA.CITY will initiate capacity building processes in 6 residential subdivisions located in Belgium, Denmark and France. And will explore 3 location-based experiential learning methods, namely telling, envisioning and making." "FWO travel credit for a long stay abroad at the University of Lodz Polen" "Bie PLEVOETS" ArcK "Since a few decades, adaptive reuse of buildings has become a highly specialized domain within architectural and conservation practice and is becoming a field of scholarly study in its own right. However, juxtaposing, or complementary to this highly specialized practice, people reuse and adapt all sort of buildings in a spontaneous and informal way - what we call 'vernacular adaptation'. During my research stay I investigated such 'vernacular adaptation' of the build heritage, its specific characteristics, opportunities and threats as well as its influence on the more formal adaptive reuse practice. The research was a joint project with Dr. Julia Sowinska-Heim from the University of Lodz. The case study site 'Off Poitrkowska' was located in Lodz." "The role of crossmodal correspondences in a multisensory setting on the evaluation of products and retail environments." "Jan VANRIE" "Marketing, ArcK" "My project is concerned with studying the effects of crossmodal correspondences on product level and on retail environment level. A crossmodal correspondence refers to the tendency of a sensory perception to be matched with an expectation for another sense. For example, crossmodal correspondence research shows that when you smell a vanilla scent, there is an automatic activation of another sense. In particular, the concept of yellow for the visual sense. Thus, there is a crossmodal correspondence between the olfactory sense (vanilla scent) and the visual sense (yellow). During my project, I want to investigate whether crossmodal correspondences between on the one hand seeing something (visual sense) and on the other hand smelling something (olfactory sense) or hearing something (auditory sense) can affect preference and evaluation of products and retail designs. For example, in line with the former example of vanilla scent and the colour yellow, one might expect that there is a preference for a yellow retail design when there is an ambient scent of vanilla or in other words when the crossmodal correspondence is met. The results of my project will help product designers, Retail designers and marketing professionals to shape their product and retail design in such a way that expectations triggered by crossmodal correspondences are optimized." "Building resilience in Urban Food Systems. The challenge of scaling-up alternative food distribution networks. An exploration through comparative case-study analysis." "Frank Moulaert" "Architecture and Society, Division of Geography and Tourism" "This dissertation focuses on the governance of alternative food networks (AFNs). The aim is to identify, conceptualize and empirically investigate the critical governance tensions conditioning the genesis and the life-course of alternative food initiatives. To this purpose this dissertation develops a Hybrid Governance Approach (HGA) which identifies three types of governance tensions - i.e. organizational, resource and institutional - and analyses the interrelations among them in different case-studies of local food initiatives in the Brussels-Capital Region. An international case study - Toronto - is investigated to learn from similarities and differences in the ways local food networks experience and address governance tensions in the two city-regions’ food policy trajectories. The empirical findings of this dissertation help to unravel the contradictions and dilemmas that AFNs face in their dynamic reproduction. The need to cope with their own spatial-material growth, to secure necessary material-operational resources - among which arable land to feed (alternative) food systems - as well as the necessity to deal with often contradictory multi-level socio-institutional environments are among the key factors of governance tension in AFNs. The analysis is also attentive to the outcomes of the governance tensions in the life-course of local food initiatives and thus to the promising organizational strategies, self-reflexive and co-learning dynamics put into place by AFNs to cope with the experienced tensions or to channel them into sustainable directions." "Cross-layer optimization with real-time adaptive dynamic spectrum management for fourth generation broadband access networks" "Marc Moonen" "ESAT - STADIUS, Stadius Centre for Dynamical Systems, Signal Processing and Data Analytics" "To enable next generation reliable and fast broadband internet access, it will be crucial to develop innovative broadband access network technologies. The fourth generation broadband access (4GBB) network currently envisaged consists of a hybrid fiber –digital subscriber line (DSL) deployment, in which fiber is brought to the curb and existing telephony DSL twisted-copper pairs are used to bridge the last 20-200 meters. Techno-economic analysis has identified this 4GBB network as the most viable option for the next 15-20 years, and a final step towards ultimate fiber-to-the-home broadband access, targeting data rates of up to gigabits per second. Providing these data rates over twisted-copper pairs is currently a significant challenge. State-of-the-art wireline transmission techniques, such as multiple-input/multiple output (MIMO) signaling and discrete multitone (DMT) modulation, succeed in optimally exploiting the space and frequency dimension to boost data rates, but fail to properly exploit the time dimension. The aim of this project is to develop a radically new concept of real-time adaptive dynamic spectrum management that can be combined with MIMO-DMT techniques currently under development so as to additionally exploit the time dimension optimally. For this a fully integrated and customized cross-layer optimization framework will be developed for 4GBB, in order to exploit the full potential of the envisaged network infrastructure."