Follow-up Funding Awarded for Apples & Oysters: Value-Sensitive Design for Just and Sustainable VvE Renovations

We are pleased to share that the team behind the Delft Design for Values seed project Apples & Oysters has received follow-up funding from the Dutch Climate Research Initiative (KIN) for a new project: VSD-VvE: Value-Sensitive Design for Just and Sustainable VvE Renovations.

About the project

Many homes need sustainable renovations, but processes are challenging, especially for homeowners’ associations. Renovations are often viewed from technical, financial, and expert perspectives, overlooking minority voices and values like user experience, aesthetics, or autonomy. That is why we are testing and validating Value-Sensitive-Design approach (VSD) for further development and wide application in homeowners’ associations. This means a systemic change achieved by reversing current decision-making processes.

Through a transdisciplinary team of scientists, social partners, municipality of Amsterdam, and homeowners’ associations, we guarantee a widely supported and practical method that leads to better, fairer decision-making and the upscaling of sustainable housing renovations.

Building on Apples & Oysters

In the ‘Apples and Oysters’ project, we explored how a VSD approach can be used to inform sustainable renovation decision-making in VvEs. We developed and tested a theoretical framework based on desk research, focus groups with homeowners, and interviews with VvE advisors, concluding that a VSD approach can help to put VvE actors in a ‘frame of mind’ that enables more transformative and just decision-making processes concerning collective renovations.

VSD-VvE is one of 40 projects funded under the KIN Science in Transition programme, find the full list here.

Read the full article on the AMS Institute website here.

Project team

Lidwine Spoormans (TU Delft), Maéva Dang (Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions) and Martijn de Vries (Populytics)