gni anno unibz invita ricercatori e ricercatrici a presentare idee di progetti che affrontino il tema della sostenibilità e degli obiettivi di sviluppo sostenibile delle Nazioni Unite (SDGs). L'invito a presentare progetti di ricerca interdisciplinari promuove la collaborazione tra Facoltà e dipartimenti e il collegamento tra scienze sociali, umanistiche, tecniche e naturali per affrontare le sfide più urgenti in materia di sostenibilità. Lasciatevi ispirare dai progetti finanziati nel 2024.
Progetti finanziati nel 2024:
The carbon footprint of the digital sector accounts for more than 3% of the entire equivalent CO2 emissions and is rapidly growing. Currently, web applications waste resources by providing functionalities and operating with higher-quality attributes that certain users do not need. On the other hand, the users do not have any decision power over the resources that are used by the application. Facing this context, this research project proposes a solution to empower web application users to make eco-friendly and sustainable choices. By proposing that users can reduce energy consumption by turning off functionalities and making trade-offs related to quality attribute parameters, we explore a new dimension not yet considered in the current literature for the development of sustainable web applications. To enable this solution's implementation, this project focuses on two challenges: to make it easily pluggable into existing applications and to provide a user interface accessible to non-technical users. The activities are structured following the Design Science Research framework, and the implementation will use metadata-based framework patterns and participatory design principles.
"This project explores a new perspective in the sustentability of web applications, allowing the users to make decisions that impact in their energy consumption. Besides that, the solutions developed as part of the project will be easier to plug-in into applications, reducing the impact of its adoption."
The solution will be evaluated in actual applications from a local software startup and from Open Data Hub in a study that will perform assessments to evaluate user experience, modularity, and energy consumption. The primary result of this project is a framework model based on software engineering and interaction design best practices that will easily enable web applications to empower users to make eco-friendly choices. Additionally, during the project, it will also be created a reference implementation for the model, which will be available as an open-source project for being directly used or extended by applications. Based on these results, the adoption of user customization can be made possible as an alternative to improve web application sustainability, reducing their energy consumption and potentially having a high impact on the carbon footprint of the digital sector.
This research explores Human-centred Design with students and researchers, from heterogeneous backgrounds: humanities/arts and technology. Working in heterogeneous teams, they are challenged to overcome disciplinary borders and design human-centred technology-enhanced prototypes together. The focus of the research is not in so much how to support the production of quality products, but how to best support the quality of inter- and trans-disciplinary processes and the experience for its participants.
"As a researcher in Human-Centred Design (HCD), working in academia and hence with a focus on the public good, I try to understand not only how to create quality products, but above all how to sustain a quality HCD process as a form of continuous learning between participants. Dialogue between different disciplines and emerging technologies thus become tools for continuous mutual learning."
Regarding the achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a sobering picture and powerful call for action emerges. Aligning with SDG4’s role as a key enabler for the other SDGs, this project focuses on primary school children's perceptions, experiences, values and attitudes, thus enabling an approach to their perspectives and worldview(s) on sustainability. The proposed research combinesChildhood Studies and a bodily phenomenological perspective,recognizing children as skilful experts and right-holders, while emphasizing their social-embeddedness and responsive relationship to the world.
“What excites us most about this project is the opportunity to recognize children as learners, active thinkers, actors, and rights holders within the context of sustainability. Motivated by the challenge of developing child-appropriate methods that allow their embodied experiences, values, and perspectives to truly come through, we aim to engage with children on their terms to jointly create grounded and transformative understandings of sustainability that reflect their lived realities and shape the future.”
With this theoretical framework, the research project aims to close the attitude-behavior-gap and limited impact of the various sustainable development initiatives like Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) by starting from and assessing children’s perceptions, experiences and values. It does so employing a mixed-methods participatory and social justice design whereby the Mosaic Approach builds the larger qualitative part (quan + QUAL). This multi-methodological and participatory approach allows focusing on learners’individual transformation processes, which is in line with the idea of transformative action as introduced by UNESCO in 2019. This paves the way for a future vision of sustainability from the children’s view.
GrapesTalk is an interdisciplinary research project aimed at defining sustainable, food-grade, scalable, zero-waste strategies for the recovery of bio-active compounds from grape stalks, investigating their potential applications, and testing the biomass residues after extraction as sustainable energy source. Grape stalks are an inevitable product of the winemaking process, with present-day limited direct application in the wine industry. This material is just a major waste for the wineries to be disposed of, with related costs and environmental issues. In reality, grape stalks and their extracts have a rich composition in bio-active compounds, that might be applied in many different fields, such as phenolic-rich additives, adjuvants, cellulosic materials, hemicellulose, and even as bio-sorbent. Beside unbound phenolic components, lignin is one of the most abundant components in stalks, consisting of a rich network of polymerized phenolic compounds. Several strategies have been investigated to yield a partial or even total breakdown of the lignocellulosic fraction, with subsequent extraction of the depolymerization products, potentially providing an inexhaustible source of phenolic compounds from a practically inexpensive source material. Furthermore, the wet residues coming from the extraction process could be considered as suitable substrates for further hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) to be converted into hydrochar, a carbonaceous material with fuel characteristics. In this project, the aim is to develop a low-impact strategy for phenolic extraction from grape stalks, for example by combining low energy-high throughput extraction strategies (e.g., application of ultrasounds, deep eutectic solvents) with the application of minimally, partially, or totally depolymerizing conditions. On the one hand, the extracted phenolic fraction will be characterized analytically, and it will be tested in different ways, e.g., as an oenological additive to reduce or replace certain additives currently used in the winemaking (e.g., sulfites), and in evaluating its impact on wine quality (e.g., color and aroma profile), thus enabling potentially a more efficient re-use of this winemaking waste directly into the winemaking process.
"A very interesting application of the project will be the testing of the efficacy of the extracts in reducing or even replacing the use of chemicals in winemaking, traditionally added as preservatives into wine (e.g. sulphites); things would get even more challenging if some of the extracted compounds can have a good impact on the chemical stability, while others do not, because this would also require a fractionation of the extracts. Last but surely not least, there is one more thing driving the development of the study in this project: the scalability of the final process; in the future, the results obtained from Grapestalk may be brought up to pilot scale, and possibly tested directly in the reality of wineries."
The residues collected after extraction will not be treated as a waste, but converted into hydrochar via HTC. The process will be tuned to obtain a material suitable for energy purposes and the products (i.e., hydrochar and aqueous phase) will be characterized in detail.
The research project “HERE - Heritage Education: enhancing citizenship in a shaped-by-diversity region” - initiated by the Competence Centre for Inclusion in Education and the Faculty of Art and Design - aims to gain more precise knowledge about primary-school-aged children’s concepts of heritage. We consider heritage as a unity of natural, tangible and intangible cultural elements and the valorisation of heritage as one of the objectives of citizenship education (educazione civica). To reconstruct children’s orientations on Heritage, under the shared methodological approach of Design Based Research and Design Thinking “Real World Labs” with children are designed, with participative observations and group discussions embedded.
“What I find really cool about our interdisciplinary research project is the creative and playful approach to reconstruct children's perspectives on a socially very relevant topic, one on which children have hardly been heard before!“
The research contributes to filling a meaningful research gap, namely the lack of a thick theoretical foundation and consequent practices of Heritage Education with primary school aged children in both formal and non-formal educational context.