Gunter Bombaerts

• Eindhoven University of Technology

Postphenomenology and mediation theory strongly explain the micro-level interactions between human individuals and objects. Recently, humans as a collective have been added to the theory at the political macro-level, which we argue that is an important contribution. However, the enlargement of the theory would also merit a meso-level explanation of...

Responding to the need for a timely and authoritative volume dedicated to this burgeoning and expansive area of research, this handbook will provide readers with a map of themes, topics, and arguments in the field of engineering ethics education (EEE). Featuring critical discussion, research collaboration, and a team of international contributors...

Op vele plaatsen in het hoger onderwijs vinden initiatieven plaats om onderwijs en leren te vernieuwen. Doel van dit onderzoek is meer kennis te verwerven over het leren, ontwikkelen en professionaliseren van HO-docenten in de context van onderwijsinnovaties. Daartoe zijn een literatuurstudie verricht naar 68 wetenschappelijke artikelen, een casest...

Background Challenge‐based learning (CBL) is a pedagogical approach increasingly adopted in engineering education. Despite its growing practice, there is little consensus in the literature about how CBL is implemented in engineering curricula and what experiences teachers and students have in relation to it. Purpose To address this gap, the follow...

As the signatories of this manifesto, we denounce the attention economy as inhumane and a threat to our sociopolitical and ecological well-being. We endorse policymakers' efforts to address the negative consequences of the attention economy's technology, but add that these approaches are often limited in their criticism of the systemic context of h...

For Niklas Luhmann, the political system's primary function is the establishment of decision premises for future decisions, with these decisions being applied across different societal subsystems. However, Luhmann recognized that this resulted in the political system running the risk of de‐differentiating itself when producing collectively binding...

Challenge Based Learning (CBL) is an educational approach that has gained popularity in response to the need for authentic learning environments. While the CBL literature is predominantly focused on cases of pedagogical implementations, the actual processes by which students develop CBL projects remain under-investigated. This shortitudinal study s...

Slavoj Zizek’s criticism of Western Buddhism (2014) for being a late capitalist opiate of the people is partly unwarranted and partly of undeniable relevance. His implicit assumption is that Buddhism is an internalist path that only looks into the individual inner world, leaving harmful societal systems in peace. This article offers a response to Z...

Higher education (HE) is engaged in a variety of educational innovations, as well as professional development initiatives (PDIs) to support teachers in attaining the required expertise. To improve teacher professional learning and development (PLD) and innovation processes, it is important to understand whether, how and why different PLD practices...

Current societal changes and challenges demand a broader role of technological universities, thus opening the question of how their role evolved over time and how to frame their current responsibility. In response to urgent calls for debating and redefining the identity of contemporary technological universities, this paper has two aims. The first...

Students in Challenge-based learning (CBL) courses work in multidisciplinary groups to develop a solution to an open-ended and ill-defined challenge.Thus, in CBL, students need to regulate their learning individually and collectively to learn. Socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL) refers to the development of collective and co-constructed t...

We analyse the creation of European university alliances as an effort to build learning networks between universities in light of newly perceived needs in Europe. The rationales for such alliance formation include cultural integration, grand societal challenges and reforms in the European innovation ecosystem. We consider how alliance formation may...

Purpose The purpose of this article is to summarize three Luhmannian critiques on morality, illustrate new roles for morality and add constructive interpretations. Design/methodology/approach Luhmann has recently been described as downright negative toward morality, resulting in a refusal to use ethics as a sociologist, thus leading to a limited u...

The article argues that mainstream value-sensitive approaches to design have been based on narrow understandings of personhood and social dynamics, which are biased toward Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic cultures and contradicted by empirical evidence. To respond to this weakness, the article suggests that design may benefit fro...

The three-tenet model, which focuses on ‘distributional justice’, ‘procedural justice’, and ‘justice as recognition’, has emerged as the most influential framework in the field of energy justice. Based on critical reviews of the three-tenet model, we identify three challenges that the model currently still faces: (i) a normative challenge on the gr...

Universities and their changing role in society is a source of perennial debate. In this article, we examine the emergent phenomenon of University Campus Living Labs (UCLL), the set of practices by which universities use their own buildings, streets or energy infrastructure as experimental settings in order to support applied teaching, research and...

The European Union’s Clean Energy Package (CEP) plans to transform ‘passive consumers’ into ‘active citizens’ to support the transition to a carbon-neutral energy system by 2050. By stimulating the growth of renewable energy communities, the CEP works towards the redefinition of renewable energy as an economic commodity to a common good. In this pa...

The “attention economy” refers to the tech industry’s business model that treats human attention as a commodifiable resource. The libertarian critique of this model, dominant within tech and philosophical communities, claims that the persuasive technologies of the attention economy infringe on the individual user’s autonomy and therefore the propos...

Bruno Latour’s “practical climatoscepticism” expresses our moral inhibition with respect to the climate crisis. In spite of Clive Hamilton’s claim that the Anthropocene condition requires us to be suspicious of all previous (i.e. Holocene) ontologies, we propose a threefold Anthropocene ontological structure inspired by non-axial Buddhist elements....

Academic entrepreneurship is a contentious university activity, but there is little engagement in the relevant literature with the idea of the university itself. References and assumptions about the role of universities in society are barely made explicit even though the centuries-old development of the idea of the university carries great insights...

Challenge-based learning (CBL) exposes students to the complexities of open-ended and real-life challenges and encourages them to be in the lead of their learning. The role of teachers remains important but shifts from being the expert to the role of a coach who gradually scaffolds students into becoming independent learners. Accordingly, the inter...

The article argues that mainstream value-sensitive approaches to design have been based on narrow understandings of personhood and social dynamics, which are biased towards Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic cultures and contradicted by empirical evidence. To respond to this weakness, the article suggests that design may benefit fr...

This Research Full Paper reports on a study conducted at a Dutch technological university, which examined how students engage with societal aspects in a Challenge-Based Learning course on Ethics and Data Analytics. Responsibility is a core concept for engineering ethics, yet there is still little known about how to best foster responsibility and th...

This chapter explores the shift in the balance of individual versus collective values instigated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The incredible viral spread rate among the population and its relatively high fatality rate has initially resulted in an assertion of the primacy of collective values (such as collective safety, collective responsibility, confo...

Energy justice literature generally treats its three tenets, distributional justice, procedural justice and recognition justice, as separate and independent issues. These are seen as separate dimensions by which criteria can be formulated for a just state of affairs. And a just state of affairs regarding energy should fulfill all criteria. However...

Virtue accounts of innovation ethics have recognized the virtue of creativity as an admirable trait in innovators. However, such accounts have not paid sufficient attention to the way creativity functions as a collective phenomenon. We propose a collective virtue account to supplement existing virtue accounts. We base our account on Kieran’s defini...

Challenge-based learning (CBL) for engineering ethics tasks students with identifying ethical challenges in cooperation with an external partner, e.g., a technology company. As many best-practice parameters of such courses remain unclear, this contribution focuses on a teacher-centric introduction into deploying CBL for engineering ethics. Taking G...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss problems related to value-sensitive design frameworks, especially in cross-cultural and international environments, and why “norm-sensitive design” would be a better alternative. To do so, this paper is divided into three parts. First, it begins by discussing the nature of value-sensitive design and why it mi...

Challenge-based learning (CBL) is a trending educational concept in engineering education. The literature suggests that there is a growing variety in CBL implementations, stemming from the flexible and abstract definition of CBL that is shaped by teachers' perceptions. The chapter discusses how the CBL concept has been developed at Eindhoven Univer...

The chapter presents the implementation of ethics education via CBL in three European settings. At TU Eindhoven (The Netherlands), a mandatory first year User, Society and Enterprise course on the ethics and history of technology offers a CBL alternative on ethics and data analytics in collaboration with internal student and research teams. Univers...

Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) is an active-learning pedagogy increasingly used in Engineering Education to prepare students for their future careers by emphasizing knowledge acquisition and application and developing disciplinary and transdisciplinary skills. The purpose of this study is to describe the implementation of a CBL course, guided by th...

The convergent development of (renewable) distributed electricity sources, storage technologies (e.g., batteries), ‘big data’ devices (e.g., sensors, smart meters), and novel ICT infrastructure matching energy supply and demand (smart grids) enables new local and collective forms of energy consumption and production. This socio-technical evolution...

Background While educators strive for optimal student motivation to enhance the quality of learning for all, different students attending the same course can have different needs. Person‐centered approaches on basic needs profiles, categorizing individuals into groups with similar motivational profiles, have the potential to inform the relationship...

This paper aims to open up high-level waste management practices to a political philosophical questioning, beyond the enclosure implied by the normative ethics approaches that prevail in the literature. Building on previous insights derived from mediation theory (in particular the work of Verbeek and Dorrestijn), Foucault and science and technology...

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is one the key pedagogical principles of Challengebased Learning (CBL) in engineering curricula. Students in CBL have the primary responsibility for planning, implementing, and evaluating their effort and progress. This study explores the use of learning portfolios as a pedagogical tool aimed to document students’ SRL...

Power, as enacted in educational practices, is a critical issue that shapes all aspects of engineering education. Yet, there is little research within engineering education on how power manifests itself in what we teach and how we teach it. In this paper we use engineering ethics education as an exemplar to interrogate how power tacitly influences...

Research on the effectiveness of case studies in teaching engineering ethics in higher education is underdeveloped. To add to our knowledge, we have systematically compared the outcomes of two case approaches to an undergraduate course on the ethics of technology: a detached approach using real-life cases and a challenge-based learning (CBL) approa...

The purpose of this study is to determine what good coaching during Design-Based Learning (DBL) entails by integrating theoretical and practical perspectives on good coaching. For this purpose, a grounded theory approach was used. For the practical perspective, themes on good coaching were derived from a qualitative study on coaching by observing a...

This paper makes a conceptual inquiry into the notion of ‘publics’, and forwards an understanding of this notion that allows more responsible forms of decision-making with regards to technologies that have localized impacts, such as wind parks, hydrogen stations or flood barriers. The outcome of this inquiry is that the acceptability of a decision...

This article considers academic energy modelling as a scientific practice. While models and modelling have been of considerable interest in energy social science research, few studies have brought together approaches from philosophy of science and anthropology to examine energy models both conceptually and in the applied sense. We develop a concept...

Our energy systems are truly international, and yet even now, our energy policies tend to be grounded at the national level and in many instances, remain ill-equipped to tackle transboundary energy issues. Our energy policy systems are also largely detached from the concerns of ethics or justice. It follows that we must find new and innovative ways...

This chapter discusses how a comparative philosophical model can contribute to both substantive and procedural values in energy policy. We discuss the substantive values in the mainstream light-emitting diodes (LEDs) debate and Taylor Stone’s alternative plea for darkness. We also explore Value Sensitive Design as a procedural approach. We conclude...

Community-driven energy initiatives are seen as important drivers of the energy transition. So far these initiatives focused mainly on energy generation and conservation. Recently however, some initiatives started to adopt smart grid technologies like Virtual Power Plants (VPP) which enables them to become involved in the distribution, trading and...

A course on ethics and history of technology, taught to 1886 first-year engineering students of 14 engineering departments was redesigned using Self-Determination Theory (SDT) by adapting many course elements at the same time. We applied the situational level of Vallerand’s hierarchical model, analysing how the elements of this ethics and history c...

The purpose of this study is to determine what good coaching during design-based learning (DBL) entails by integrating theoretical and practical perspectives on good coaching. For this purpose, a grounded theory approach was used. For the practical perspective, themes on good coaching were derived from a qualitative study on coaching by observing a...

We must find new and innovative ways of conceptualizing transboundary energy issues, of embedding concerns of ethics or justice into energy policy, and of operationalizing response to them. This book stems from the emergent gap; the need for comparative approaches to energy justice, and for those that consider ethical traditions that go beyond the...

Introduction Several course aspects can affect students’ motivation and engagement with it. This study focuses on an 11-week course on ethics and history of technology (USE Base course), taught to 2000+ first-year engineering students. Previous evaluations of the USE Base course showed that students of Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INF/AM) a...

Introduction: Learning context plays an important role in students’ motivation to learn. Intrinsic motivation is important in order to foster students’ deep learning, better performance and overall well- being. According to Self Determination Theory (SDT) of motivation, three basic needs should be satisfied for students to achieve intrinsic motivat...

Introduction Self Determination Theory (SDT) suggests that the satisfaction of the basic psychological needs contributes to students’ intrinsic motivation as well as a deep approach to learning. In our study, we used the SDT framework to evaluate and redesign a large basic course of History and Ethics for first year engineering students. Methods...

Employers and society have of engineers nowadays are different from those of even a few decades ago, and universities have been trying to respond to these changing needs by rethinking and redesigning their courses. This paper describes the large-scale efforts by Eindhoven University of Technology to redesign its entire undergraduate program. More s...

In dit artikel wordt besproken hoe organisaties de sterktes van de groter wordende groep 55-69 jarigen kunnen benutten. We willen u vooral bekoren met het positieve lied van de ONTgrijzing. Het ouder worden van de bevolking heeft een belangrijke sterkte in zich. In Vlaanderen en Nederland wordt de groep 55-69-jarigen in een snel tempo vitaler. In...

De mantra van de vergrijzing is ondertussen welgekend. Steeds minder mensen op de arbeidsmarkt moeten zorgen voor steeds meer mensen op rust. Op die arbeidsmarkt wordt de groep 50+ bovendien steeds groter. In dit themaboek kiezen we niet voor de klaagzang, maar voor het positieve lied. Niet om de problemen te minimaliseren, wel om te vertrekken va...

Veel werknemers hopen nog vervroegd op pensioen te kunnen gaan. Ondanks de crisis kunnen we stellen dat de vergrijzing daar sowieso een stokje voor zal steken. Werknemers maar ook werkgevers en hr-verantwoordelijken zullen hun verantwoordelijkheid moeten dragen.

U bent zelf helemaal overtuigd van leeftijdsbewust personeelsbeleid maar u moet nog een aantal andere cruciale personen overtuigen? Of u bent niet overtuigd, maar wil dat wel worden. Of u bent niet overtuigd dat overtuiging werkt? Dan is deze tekst iets voor u.

Kennis is zonder twijfel dé kwaliteit die oudere werknemers kunnen uitspelen. En kennis is zonder twijfel dé uitdaging voor de competitieve bedrijfsleiders van de 21e eeuw. Kennismanagement en leeftijdsbewust beleid zullen dan ook onlosmakelijk verbonden zijn in een organisatie die zich bevindt in een samenleving met een steeds groter wordende groe...

Het is een diepgeworteld beeld dat ouderen meer afwezig zijn dan jongeren. Maar de realiteit is echter genuanceerder. Een goed inzicht in de feiten en een goed aanwezigheidsbeleid verhogen de concurrentiepositie en kunnen de meerkost van personeel extreem verlagen.

De crisis is in het land. De werkloosheid stijgt enorm. De afgelopen 6 maanden verschoof voor hr daardoor de aandacht drastisch van werving -‘Maakt niet uit welke kleur de raaf heeft, als ie maar wil’- naar selectie - 'Welke competentie-witte raaf willen we?’ Het wordt dus opnieuw belangrijk om u en uw medewerkers te wapenen tegen die menselijke re...

Nombre de travailleurs espèrent encore pouvoir prendre leur retraite anticipée. Pourtant, indépendamment de la crise, le vieillissement de la population y fera obstacle. Les travailleurs, mais aussi les employeurs et les responsables RH, vont devoir prendre leurs responsabilités.

Si l’on affirme généralement que l’absentéisme des travailleurs âgés est plus élevé que celui des jeunes, la réalité est toutefois plus nuancée.

Zes maanden geleden was leeftijdsbewust beleid hot. Waarschuwingen en analyses van de grootte en de risico’s van de vergrijzing waren dagelijkse kost in de media. Knelpuntvacatures leken een onuitroeibare epidemie voor onze economie.Tot de crisis zich tussen onze collectieve oren nestelde. Plots werd het muisstil rond leeftijdsbewust beleid. Alle a...

Vous êtes convaincu de l’intérêt d’une politique du personnel attentive à l’âge, mais vous devez encore en convaincre des figures-clés ? Ou vous n’en êtes pas convaincu, mais vous voudriez l’être. Ou bien vous n’êtes pas convaincu que la conviction, ça marche ? Alors, lisez ceci.

De mantra van de vergrijzing is ondertussen welgekend. Steeds minder mensen op de arbeidsmarkt moeten zorgen voor steeds meer mensen op rust. Op die arbeidsmarkt wordt de groep 50+ bovendien steeds groter. In dit themaboek kiezen we niet voor de klaagzang, maar voor het positieve lied. Niet om de problemen te minimaliseren, wel om te vertrekken van...

Il y a quelques mois, la notion de «politique du personnel tenant compte de l'âge» était sur toutes les lèvres. Les avertissements et les analyses concernant l'importance et les risques du vieillissement faisaient régulièrement la une des médias. Quant aux fonctions critiques, elles constituaient une véritable épidémie pour notre économie. Jusqu'à...

La crise frappe notre pays. Le chômage grimpe en flèche, et redessine les stratégies RH : en 6 mois de temps, l'on est passé du recrutement du type «peu importe la couleur du merle, pour peu qu’il soit disposé à travailler» à la sélection du type «Quel oiseau rare recherchons-nous ?».

Le savoir est sans aucun doute la principale qualité des travailleurs âgés. Par ailleurs, il constitue le défi par excellence pour les chefs d'entreprise compétitifs du XXIe siècle. Le management des compétences et la politique du personnel tenant compte de l'âge sont, dès lors, indissociablement liés pour les organisations qui évoluent dans une so...

After an accidental radioactive release leading to contamination of the food chain, countermeasures may be used to reduce the radiological health risk to the population and to bring social reassurance. This paper analyses public acceptance and consumer’s behaviour for various countermeasures for contaminated milk as revealed by a recent public surv...

The main aim of this contribution is to provide guidance (in terms of quality criteria) for setting up foresight exercises as a platform for discussion and communication of the benefits and drawbacks of fusion with a broad range of stakeholders. At the same time, we explore conditions that might enhance the resonance of such foresight exercises in...

This article compares expert framings on energy models in order to improve communication on energy scenarios. It gives a brief theoretical elaboration on the framing concept in science and the consequences for modelling. From these insights we look into the use of energy models in communication on fusion energy decision-making. We discuss results o...

Mol Nuclear Waste Consultaion (MONA) has requested Belgium Nuclear Research Centre (SCN-CEN) to perform a multi-criteria analysis (MCA) for deep and surface disposal of radioactive wastes in Mol regions. MONA in assistance with SCN-CEN has selected MCA options for two low-level radioactive waste disposal that include surface repository and deep rep...

Room For (More Than) Space! Taking Space Seriously. Law, Space and Society in Contemporary Israel, by Issachar Rosen-Zvi. Ashgate, 2004. 224pp. ISBN 0-7546-2351-3

Public participation in a complex technological issue such as the management of radioactive waste needs to be based on a simultaneous construction of scientific, ethical and socio-political foundations. Confronting this challenge is in no way straightforward. The problem is not only that the ‘hard’ technocrats downplay the importance of socio-polit...

Nuclear Waste. Law, Policy and Pragmatism, by Peter Riley. Ashgate, 2004. 300pp. ISBN 0‐7546‐2318‐1

Waiting for Rain. The Politics and Poetry of Drought in Northeast Brazil, by Nicholas Gabriel Arons. University of Arizona Press, 2004. 251pp. ISBN 0-8165-2330-4. The Economics of Biodiversity Conservation, by Stephan Polasky. Ashgate, 2002. 466pp. ISBN 0-7546-2205-3. The Sharing Economy. Solidarity Networks Transforming Globalization, by Lorna Gol...

Dit themanummer bekijkt de energieproblematiek vanuit de optiek van duurzame ontwikkeling. Een eerste reeks artikels gaan in op het energiedebat op globaal, Europees en nationaal (Belgisch) niveau. In een tweede reeks artikels wordt de problematiek van (burger)participatie - als inherent deel van de duurzame ontwikkelingslogica - onder de loupe gen...

In this article, we compare the RISCOM model and the Belgian partnership model. After a brief description of the participation methodologies, we give 5 recommendations: (1) A critical precautionary approach happens more profoundly if a European 'counter institute' is set in place and if non-participative forces are acknowledged. (2) A guardian of t...