What an eventful two weeks have I had (and it’s not even Christmas yet). They were mainly filled with following courses and attending a circular economy event. So, my blog is a bit longer than usual.
Course
I followed a bunch of courses to help me improve my research content, develop myself in areas such as time management, and learn some techniques to manage stress.
First of all a course that blew away my mind. The Creative and Critical Thinking course. A course on logical thinking, structuring and socratic reasoning. The course focused on writing a proposition. At the TU Delft (and probably more universities) a maximum of 10 opposable and defendable propositions should accompany your thesis. So, it seems to me that it is quite important to know more about the type of claims (e.g., normative, descriptive etc.) there are, the type of assumptions and reasoning structures (e.g., inductive, deductive etc.) these are based on, possible fallacies (which you definitely do not want to commit). Through formulating and discussing my proposition I learned to look more critically at what I am stating and what the underlying assumptions are. I also learned to be aware what the frame is from which I am making looking at a certain claim. We were also asked to look at the proposition from other frames and to formulate arguments for and against the claim based on these differing frames. A very helpful exercise that I will be using more explicitly in my daily work. The small group of 6 PhD candidates made it easy to interact and the very compelling teacher, when asked, was happy to elaborate on specific topics and provide additional examples to clarify certain concepts. The course took three Friday mornings, but in my personal opinion it should be extended so you could go more in depth.
Secondly, the Effective Management of your PhD course: a course that took two mornings. The main take aways from the first morning were to break down the main research question of the PhD in subresearch questions (and so on), which are mutually exclusive. In addition, we were urged to state the hypotheses behind the questions in order to have a clear view of what we are trying to confirm (or not) by answering the research question. The second morning, was more about time management. Here the lecturer based his lecture on Tim Allen’s book Getting Things Done. Which is based on listing everything you need to, categorizing it in a meaningful way to you, allocating time in your agenda for taks that take more than 2 minutes working on one task at a time and moving on when this task is finished. While this may come across as super structured, using this method, together with my bullet journal, helps me to keep some form of “sanity” haha. Through some discussion with some colleagues, I also noticed that a lot of my time was lost by checking emails and social media during the day. Based on the take aways from this article, shared in the class, I now choose to allocate time in my agenda to spend on this (instead of being available all the time). Secondly, to prepare for meetings I trail ran this method to create meeting agendas. Basically, I include the questions that I want my supervisors to think about instead of merely the topics, I explicitly state the time we have to talk about specific subjects, the process to go through them and, most importantly, what I want to get out of the discussion. I might be able to say more about whether this worked out in a couple of months (let’s hope I won’t forget). These may seem like trivial tips, but it does help me loads to apply these and keep being organised. I realised that I should be less rigid and build in some flexibility as well, because there are definitely interruptions during the day.
Lastly, I am in the process of completing the Brain Management course. A course on how the brain works and that centers around teaching techniques regarding relaxation, stress management, and increased focus and concentration. The course is based on the Silva method. The main take-aways for me are related to creating some space in my daily life to apply the exercises. So, one of my goals is to try and build in some moments during the day for relaxation (morning, noon and evening) so that I can prevent myself from feeling overworked. I also, want to apply the techniques to increase my concentration when working on specific tasks.
De Nationale Denktank
On December 10, I went to the final presentation of the Nationale Denktank which took place in the beautiful Planetarium of Artis. This year the students were asked to come up with solutions to accelerate the transition towards a circular economy. During the event the students presented ideas. They will either continue working on the ideas now that or they will transfer the project to others who will continue the project. It was very interesting to see the concrete ideas the students came up with in a timeframe of just 4 months.
If I may be a bit critical: I missed an idea that was focused on tacking the current problems around product design (e.g., products not being designed to be disassembled or no take-back in place while it does make sense). Yet, I did see that this topic was marked as a problem in the analysis phase. However, this might be my blind spot… I think it would be good to keep the discussion around this topic going. The ideas that I liked were the ones around education and creating awareness about a circular economy at a young age, for example, by creating a system to share toys. This also linked to the graduation project, Olli Play, of a graduate student (and also one of friends ;-D) from 2017. She wanted to make it easier for children to give away their toys and looked at improving the interaction around the end-of-use.
The “denktankers” of this year did open up some important discussions though. One striking example was their critical note regarding the renovation of the “Binnenhof” in the Hague. This is planned to start in 2020, but not in a circular way (even though there is a lot of talk about promoting circularity and the Netherlands is considered to be a circular economy hub). Thus the students urged the government to put their money were their mouth is. Their idea was centred around urging the government to incorporate circular thinking in their institute. For example, by renovating circularly. The other ideas can be found, here.
Research Progress
Taking all this back to my research has been a lot, but made me feel more competent to deal with both the content and all things surround it. In my quest to define the word competencies I found some helpful articles and theses. Yet, it seems like the lack of consensus in different fields, might lead to me either having to synthesis findings and formulate my own definition or choose to follow a specific definition. However, all these articles have given me a better overview of the field, formed an input to my work, and made me aware of possible limitations to applying concepts and methods used in other fields in my work. In this pre-holiday week I'll be (1) working on an extended abstract for the PLATE conference, (2) extending the design for circular economy framework from my journal paper, and (3) formulating some goals regarding a project on ‘circular economy knowledge and skill building within companies’ that I will be part of.
This was my last blog for 2018. A new blog will follow in January of the new year. For now a very merry X-mass, and a happy and safe new year!