2013

The DEWIS network hosted its annual event on the 8th of October 2013. It was an event about “Design, Technology and Ethics, the two lectures (Anne Nigten and Elisa Giaccardi) were about this theme.

DEWIS chair Prof. Isabel Arends opened the event. She spoke shortly about the history, mission and its goals. Prof. Karel Luyben, Rector Magnificus of TU Delft, spoke about the Delft Technology Fellowship, that is open now for the second and last time to women scientists, currently not employed at TU Delft. This fellowship helps accelerating the increase of top women scientists at TU Delft, an important aim of the university.

Lectures

Dr. Anne Nigten spoke in her lecture “Creative Patches In Co-creation processes” about creative projects in Rotterdam. She spoke about design courses at secondary vocational level, to implementation of a creative project at the Blaak Library. The creative project, intended to improve social interaction, illustrated how this interaction between the participants got started with assignments through mobile devices.

Prof. Elisa Giaccardi opted a more philosophical approach; in her lecture “Things We Value” she spoke about changing values and how she used a meta-design framework for participative software systems in her project “Silence of the Lands”. This project aimed at connecting to the environment and connecting to each other. Elisa invited everyone to her inaugural lecture that will take place the 24th of January, 2014.

DEWIS award

DEWIS awards yearly the DEWIS award, the prize for the most promising female PhD student at TU Delft. This prize was created in 2007 to improve career prospects of young, talented women scientists by rewarding the quality of the PhDs dissertations and placing their extraordinary achievements in the spotlights.

The independent, qualified jury, who decides the winner of the award, consisted this year of: prof. Karel Luyben (Rector Magnificus TU Delft and chair of the jury), prof. Marja Elsinga (OTB, member of DEWIS board) and prof. Catherine Pappas (Applied Sciences). This year’s awardees were: Laura Anitori (EEMCS), Elham Ashoori (CEG), Ilse Oosterlaken (TPM) and Femke van Wageningen-Kessels (CEG).

Criteria to qualify for the DEWIS award are: A Cum Laude PhD, (international and/or societal) meaning of the research and originality of the research question and approach. The jury was impressed with the awardees' publications, their awards and the amount of citations so far. Besides a PhD degree with honours, the awardees had in common that they proved to belong to the top 5% of people finishing a PhD. After much deliberation, the jury decided unanimously to award the DEWIS award to Ilse Oosterlaken. 

The argumentation in support of this decision was that in her dissertation, Ilse made a very effective use of well-considered words. She also did her PhD project in 3,25 year and has many citations to her work. The jury praised Ilse for choosing the Capabilities Approach. And what is more, Ilse caught NWO funding in humanities with her ambitious dissertation approach. 

The Capabilities approach was developed by Amatya Sen and Martha Nussbaum on welfare economics. Since Sen got the Nobel prize in 1998, the capabilities approach fascinates many people and there is much written about it. “However: writing is one thing, making it actually work is another. Ilse substantially contributed to make it work and she will continue to work on it in the future” said Prof. Karel Luyben.   

The DEWIS award ceremony was set up differently to earlier editions. For the first time the awardees held a pitch about their dissertation projects. The pitches were recorded earlier, and showed at the DEWIS event. After the pitches, Karel Luyben spoke words of praise to the four awardees who were present in Delft, or were "live" through Skype or Google hangouts.

Closure DEWIS event

DEWIS chair Isabel Arends closed the event and invited everyone to the get-together. She also announced that she will officially resign as DEWIS chair in December. Prof. Frances Brazier will succeed her as DEWIS chair.

Missed the DEWIS event?

The pitches of the awardees can be viewed via links on the website of DEWIS.