Dutch-speaking PhD candidate Value-driven strategizing for transitions in the built environment

Want to shape future transitions? Join us in supporting practitioners and policymakers as they navigate real-world, value-based change through design and research.

Job description

Society faces multiple, interconnected transitions—such as the energy, circularity, and health transitions—which require new ways of thinking, collaborating, and decision-making. Across national, regional, and local levels, actors increasingly need to collectively strategize how to align diverse public values and balance short- and long-term trade-offs.

Are you excited about using design and research to help practitioners and policymakers engage in such collective strategizing? Do you want to develop tools that strengthen how actors understand, align, and act on values across governance levels? Join our team and contribute to shaping value-driven change.

This PhD position is part of the NWO-funded AMBITIONS project, a transdisciplinary consortium in the built environment. Together, we explore how value-driven tools can help practitioners and policymakers navigate value tensions that arise at the intersection of multiple transitions. Focusing on actors’ collective strategizing, you will investigate how such tools can support dealing with the complexity of multiple transitions.

You will adopt a longitudinal research-through-design methodology. Through iterative tool development, co-design workshops, and empirical studies, you will design and refine value-driven tools that can be applied in day-to-day transition work, while generating new knowledge on value-based strategizing across organizations and governance levels.

Your research and design will directly interact with other work packages and be embedded in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment consisting of consortium partners, policymakers, practitioners, and community stakeholders.

Key tasks:

• Conduct literature and methods research on value-driven strategizing and tooling.
• Prototype, test, and refine existing and new value-driven tools for collective strategizing.
• Conduct interviews, workshops, and co-design sessions to study collective strategizing across multiple transitions (using value-driven tools).
• Analyze empirical data using process-oriented research methods focusing on how value work influences mindsets, team effectiveness, and the outcomes of transition initiatives.
• Report your findings in scientific articles, and disseminate them through workshops, presentations, and other formats.
• Collaborate closely with consortium partners who will apply and validate the tools in their own projects and networks.

You will join the interdisciplinary research group Designing Value In Ecosystems, within the Design, Organisation and Strategy Department of the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft. You will have access to a wide range of expertise in design research and practice. You will work closely with a senior researcher of Avans University of Applied Sciences focused on value-driven tooling for supporting individual and collective agency in transitions. You will also collaborate with researchers at the TU Delft Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, the University of Twente, and Utrecht University. Together, you will be part of an active network of leading researchers in Design for Values, the Built Environment, and Transition Studies.

Job requirements

• Fluency in Dutch, both spoken and written.
• A completed master’s degree in design, project management, organization studies, or a related field.
• Demonstrable experience or strong affinity with designing and validating tools, methods, or interventions.
• A strong interest in complex societal challenges, design, and management.
• A strong interest in value-based research and design.
• Excellent collaboration skills; experience in inter- or transdisciplinary teamwork is an asset.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to communicate and write in English at an academic level.
• Experience working in industry or government is an asset.

TU Delft (Delft University of Technology)

Delft University of Technology is built on strong foundations. As creators of the world-famous Dutch waterworks and pioneers in biotech, TU Delft is a top international university combining science, engineering and design. It delivers world class results in education, research and innovation to address challenges in the areas of energy, climate, mobility, health and digital society. For generations, our engineers have proven to be entrepreneurial problem-solvers, both in business and in a social context. Together, we imagine, invent and create solutions using technology to have a positive impact on a global scale.

Faculty Industrial Design Engineering

Matching the evolution of people with the speed of the revolution of technology. This is the focus of the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE). Delft designers act as a bridge between advances in technology and the needs of people, organisations and society to create products, services and systems with purpose. IDE is a leader in design research across the application areas of mobility, sustainability and health, as well as its development of design tools and methods. A 350-strong research team and over 2,000 students work together in our inspiring hall, labs and studios. In close cooperation with industry, the public sector and NGOs we rehearse possible futures in research and education to design for a complex future.

Conditions of employment

Doctoral candidates will be offered a 4-year period of employment in principle, but in the form of 2 employment contracts. An initial 1.5 year contract with an official go/no go progress assessment within 15 months. Followed by an additional contract for the remaining 2.5 years assuming everything goes well and performance requirements are met. Salary and benefits are in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities, increasing from €3059 - €3881 gross per month, from the first year to the fourth year based on a fulltime contract (38 hours), plus 8% holiday allowance and an end-of-year bonus of 8.3%.

As a PhD candidate you will be enrolled in the TU Delft Graduate School. The TU Delft Graduate School provides an inspiring research environment with an excellent team of supervisors, academic staff and a mentor. The Doctoral Education Programme is aimed at developing your transferable, discipline-related and research skills. The TU Delft offers a customisable compensation package, discounts on health insurance, and a monthly work costs contribution. Flexible work schedules can be arranged.

Additional information

For more information about this vacancy, please contact Marina Bos-de Vos, Associate Professor Design for Joint Value Creation in Societal Transitions via m.bos-devos@tudelft.nl