Students and entrepreneurs have less than two months left for an entry in the NWO Young Responsible Design Award. Just apply technological innovation to solve a societal problem.
The NWO challenge is to create an innovative design or idea to solve an urgent societal problem. Designers, students and entrepreneurs from universities, companies or other organisations can participate as long as they are younger than 35 years old and they operate in an interdisciplinary team.
Think of healthcare, energy, artificial intelligence, material scarcity, information technology or food & agriculture. Hell, we have plenty of problems to choose from. The trick is to choose a technological innovation and couple that to a societal challenge.
Last year, four Delft entries were among the 17 winners of a related research programme. Dr. Eefje Cuppen proposed to study controversies and resistance against large renewable energy projects. Professor Rolf Künneke had an idea on a fair distribution of costs and benefits of locally produced energy. Dr. Virginia Dignum developed the Values4Water program for an ethical approach for water distribution among competitors. And Professor Cees van Beers researched how Dutch companies can collaborate with African entrepreneurs to develop local simpler versions of existing products.
The jury of the Young Responsible Design Award invites teams to produce a video of five minutes or less in which they propose their idea, design, system or thing of choice. The deadline is November 1, 2016.
Entries will be judged on their degree of innovation, their responsibility, the problem-solving potential and the possibility for further exploration and implementation. NWO doesn’t specify the amount of the award other than that the scientific research fund will contribute towards realising the idea.
Possibly, the best matching educational program from TU Delft and Leiden University is the minor on Responsible Innovation, coordinated by Dr. Caroline Nevejan (Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management).
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