Prize Parade 2021

At THiNK FeST on 4 November 2021, various THUAS awards have been presented for exceptional performances: Thesis Awards, Doctoral candidates, Pim Breebaart Research Award and the Olive Award (jury award and public award).

The winners have been announced in 2021:

Thesis Award

The Thesis Award is presented to students who carry out the best graduation research project.
The goal is to draw attention to theses that reflect the philosophy of the school, both within and outside of the university of applied sciences.

Thesis Award winners 2021:

Faculty Health, Nutrition & Sport - Sportmanagement

Tom Arnoldus

Het projectenlandschap binnen het sociale domein in kaart

Faculty IT & Design - User Experience Design

Justus Bremer

The Redesign of the APCICT Virtual Academy - Revamping an E-Learning Platform of a Regional Organization Under the
United Nations ESCAP

Faculty Management & Organisation - Facility Management

Lisette Draaisma

Aanpassen of uitsterven. De invloed van wendbaarheid en flexibiliteit op organisaties en hun contractmanagement

Faculty Technology, Innovation & Society - Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Casper Grootes

Designing a 4-leg SiC Inverter to connect the AC Grid with a Bipolar DC Grid

Faculty Business, Finance & Marketing - Accountancy

Kayleigh Kouwenberg

Professioneel-kritisch op afstand?

Een empirisch onderzoek naar het effect van het op afstand uitvoeren van de accountantscontrole op de professioneel
kritische instelling van de accountant

Faculty Social Work & Education - Education in Primary Schools

Kim Noordam

Leerlijn digitale geletterdheid

Faculty Public Management, Law & Safety - International Public Management

Michael Selwyn

The Gig Economy: Workers & Unions in the United Kingdom

Olive Award

The Olive Award is presented to the team of lecturers that succeeds most effectively at creating blended education. Considering the importance of the teams in designing and carrying out education, the Executive Board and deans believe that this award should not go to an individual, but to a team.

Nominated teams Olive Award 2021

• Accountancy
  Faculty Business, Finance & Marketing
  result responsible team year 4
  see also the video

• Marketing
  Faculty Business, Finance & Marketing
  team social value creation
  see also the video

• Skin Therapy
  Faculty of Health, Nutrition & Sport
  teaching team year 2
  see also the video

• International Business
  Faculty Business, Finance & Marketing
  team thinking in action
  see also the video

• Nutrition and Dietetics
  Faculty of Health, Nutrition & Sport
  minor sociology and psychology of food, fitness and health
  see also the video

Winners Olive Award 2021- jury award & public award

International Business
Faculty Business, Finance & Marketing
team thinking in action

Nanna Freeman, Wypkje van der Heide, Corina Tabacaru, Ohad Ben Shimon, Christine van der Ven, Angela Roe, Lukas Heistinger en Marloes Ambagts

The jury has chosen the Thinkin in Action lecturing team as the 2021 winner of the Olive Award because the education, developed by this team, truly represents the “Thinking we do together” slogan. The education is shaped as such that students are stimulated to improve each other’s efforts. A life long lasting benefit. The Thinking in Action team consists of enthusiastic, international members who regularly contribute to both national and international conferences and symposia, on vocational and academic level, both on- and offline. Their education is a good example of “ready for covid/remote teaching because already blended!”

Pim Breebaart Research Award

The Pim Breebaart Research Award (PBRA) is an award for inspiring research conducted at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. With this prize we want to reward partnerships between research-education-practice. We are looking for mixed teams composed of students, lecturers, researchers, professors (from practice and ongoing partners abroad).

Nominated teams Pim Breebaart Research Award 2021

• Circular business operations - Facility Management and ecology in balance-
  Rachel Kuijlenburg, Thomas Wissingh and Frans Joosstens
  Centre of Expertise Mission Zero
• Predictive maintenance for very effective asset management (PrimaVera)-
  Fidelis Theinert, Derek Land, Jeanette Prinz, Erik Sikma, Sohail Baregzai, Jerome Kemper and Timo Kerssens
  Centre of Expertise Digital Operations and Finance
• The Hague Youth and Justice –
  Rosa Groen and Isi Madojumu
  Centre of Expertise Global Governance

Pim Breebaart Research Award winners 2021:

Circular business operations - Facility Management and ecology in balance

Rachel Kuijlenburg, Thomas Wissingh and Frans Joosstens

Centre of Expertise Mission Zero

The jury was impressed by the winning research project, that researches “With which user protocol can professionals in facility management in the public sector stimulate sustainable user behavior, and make the waste and raw material streams more sustainable? And in so doing, contribute to circular business operations?” Circular business operations is a topical research with a relevant demand articulation. A broad set of partners as well as students are involved in the project. The research also has a clear added value for the field of practice and can show a list of relevant practice-oriented publications.

Doctoral candidates

We would like to reward doctoral candidates with a prize. Doctoral candidates of 2021 (between November 2020 and November 1^st 2021) will receive a figurine during THiNK FeST.

Doctoral candidates 2021:

Faculty Management & Organisation

Vasilis Karakasis

Thesis- phd: 'Adding fuel to the conflict- How gas reserves complicate the Cyprus question'

Summary
In this research Vasileios assesses the impact of the recently discovered gas reserves south off Cyprus on the escalation of the Cyprus conflict. He examines the ideational dynamics underpinning the conflict-inducing role of natural resources. Theoretically motivated by the discursive shift in conflict studies, he prioritises the collectively shared meanings of the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot opinion-leaders on the gas reserves and how these justify their conflictual strategies. To uncover these discourses, he applies Q-methodology, a research design tailor-made to ‘measure’ human subjectivity. He distinguishes five distinct discourses. With respect to the Greek-Cypriot side, he identifies (a) ‘gas boosting our geopolitical standing’, which highlights the sovereignty attributes of the natural resources, (b) ‘pipe-dreams and imported nationalisms’, which acknowledges the opportunistic motives behind the ‘geopolitical overtones’ of the Greek-Cypriot side and (c) ‘resentment matters’, which emphasizes the Greek-Cypriot grievances. As regards the Turkish-Cypriot side, he comes across two different discourses: (e) ‘gas stimulating political equality’, where Turkish-Cypriots stress their grievances over their lack of international status and the opportunities that arise from the gas reserves discovery to reverse their international isolation and (f) ‘micro-politics’, which highlights the political opportunism of particular policymakers who capitalize on the tensions in order to serve their political careers in the face of domestic turbulence. These discourses provide a holistic framework regarding the discursive factors underpinning the conflict-inducing role of natural resources within the protracted Cyprus conflict.

Faculty Business, Finance & Marketing

Julie-Marthe Lehmann

Thesis - phd: 'Balancing the social and financial sides of the coin: An action research on setting up financial self-help groups in the Netherlands'

Summary
Julie opened this dissertation by recounting her conversation with Alain, who explained what he thinks people in the Netherlands are missing: they have easy access to money, but they have to handle their financial affairs on their own. In his view, money can bind people together in social networks, but this social side of the coin is largely overlooked in the Netherlands. With the increasing individualization in today’s Dutch society, social ties have become rather loose. However, by linking the social and financial sides of the coin, CAF groups might be a way to empower people in the Netherlands. In this last chapter, Julie discusses her role as an engaged scholar before turning to her main research question: What value do CAF groups have for their members and for the broader Dutch context? This question was broken into three sub-questions in the introduction, and those sub-questions formed this dissertation’s structure, though they were not necessarily discussed in a linear chapter order. Chapters 6 and 7 addressed her first sub-question, concerning the impact of CAF-group participation on the agency and well-being of the members, while her second sub-question, about how members interact in the settings of different CAF groups, was discussed in chapters 5 and 8. After using Sen’s capability approach to elaborate on the empirical findings for these two questions, Julie explains why and how she expanded the capability approach with Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory. She then provides answers to her third sub-question, which asked about the possible significance of CAF groups for the Dutch financial landscape and the participation society. Finally, Julie recaps her main findings about the value CAF groups have for their members and for the broader Dutch context by discussing how to balance the social and financial sides of the coin.

Faculty Health, Nutrition & Sport

Sofie van Rongen

Thesis - phd: 'Social contextual influences on unhealthy food consumption: a psychological approach'

Summary
The social, economic, and physical environments strongly influence what people eat, yet it remains largely unknown how, why, and under what circumstances these contextual factors drive individual food consumption. This thesis investigates psychological explanations for how the physical food environment and socioeconomic context may steer unhealthy food consumption. In acknowledgement of the importance of a better understanding of individual processes within these contexts, the focus of the thesis is on psychological, interpretative processes and how these may influence eating behaviour. This thesis provides new insights into social influences embedded within food environments and into socioeconomic contextual influences that may contribute to a different response to unhealthy food environments. Part 1 focuses on the potential role of social norm perceptions in the relationship between the physical food environment and consumption. Part 2 focuses on experiences of scarcity and relative deprivation as potential explanations for the influence of the socioeconomic context on consumption, in light of socioeconomic disparities in diet.

Faculty Technology, Innovation & Society

Laura Stevens

Thesis - phd: 'Analogical Reasoning in Biomimicry Design Education'

Summary
Teaching is both an art and a science. Good teaching excites students and cultivates their curiosity to learn more than they are asked. But what if students’ blank faces tell you that the teaching did not land, what can you do? Using ananalogy or metaphor to explain the principle helps students visualize and comprehend the knowledge of difficult, abstract concepts by making it familiar. Hey et al. explains how the multitude of design considerations is even more difficult for novice as compared to expert designers who are more able to focus on the important features of a problem. Kolodner (1997) iterates how novice designers have difficulty sifting through the mass of information they encounter. They need help with the transfer of knowledge that analogical reasoning requires. When students can clearly extract and articulate what they have learned, this helps them to internalize this. Biomimicry education teaches the clear extraction and articulation while learning to decipher and transfer function analogies from biology to design. This transfer can also improve reasoning when solving problems (Wu and Weng, 2013), reacting to the challenge in a more ‘out-of-the-box’ manner (Yang et al. 2015). However, not being able to fully understand this “conceptual leap between biology and design” in an accurate manner, is sited as a key obstacle of this field (Rowland, 2017; Rovalo and McCardle 2019, p. 1). Therefore, didactics on how to teach this analogical leap to overcome the hurdles is essential. There is insufficient research on the effectivity of biomimicry education in design to help establish ‘best practices’. However, this thesis offers advice to fill this pedagogical gap to find out how to overcome the obstacle of analogical reasoning for novice designers while practicing biomimicry. The contribution to science is a not earlier tested methodology that leads to a clearer understanding of the translation of biological strategies and mechanisms found through scientific research. This translation from biology to design in a visual and textual manner, is called the Abstracted Design Principle (ADP) and is introduced and explained in detail in chapters 4, 5 and 6 of this thesis. Together with the proposed instructions, I sketch the net-gain of positive mind-set for novice designers on their path to design for a sustainable future.

This thesis also shows that improving analogical reasoning via the field of biomimicry is not exclusive to design students. Both designers and non-designer members of the design team learned to internalize, recognize, comprehend and apply the complex strategies and mechanisms into their project solutions. We knew that biomimicry is more than simply mimicking a pattern or form from nature and agreed with Quillin and Thomas (2015) to confirm that the combination of hand drawing biological observations and translating this knowledge into abstractions for use in design, encourages students to internalize the importance of their key role as a sustainable designer. We built on that knowledge and established that when students recognize and are aware of the three levels of analogical reasoning (form, process and system-analogies), this iteration helped increase awareness of the impact their design may have on the environment. By considering the higher levels of analogical reasoning, and by using the overarching patterns from nature as benchmarks, novice designers consciously attempt to connect the related factors within a system where a multi-functional design functions symbiotically and find areas where they have the highest possible impact of positive change.

Find short examples of the researched work on insta: @biomimicry_education