The Centre for Unusual Collaborations is thrilled to announce that five new Spark teams have been funded following the latest call for applications. These teams were formed by researchers who participated in the Spark workshops (phase one) in September and October 2024. The teams have each been granted 9,000 Euro to explore the potential of their idea in the upcoming year.
All teams will shortly get their own project page, so make sure to keep an eye on the Spark teams page.
Are you interested in becoming a member of a Spark team yourself? Then apply for a Spark grant by February 24, 2025.
From health data infrastructure to community-driven ecosystem
Co-producing privacy and data protection by empowering marginalized voices
This project focuses on how underrepresented and marginalized communities experience the use of their health data in national systems designed to support healthcare, research, innovation, and policymaking. It examines how data sharing, reuse, and linkage impact their lives, with an emphasis on privacy and data protection. By adopting a bottom-up and human-centric approach, the study aims to bring the voices of these communities to the forefront, fostering greater trust and accountability in health data systems.
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The Netherlands’ Health-RI initiative serves as a key case study, offering insights into efforts to build a coordinated national health data infrastructure. While Health-RI aims to reuse health data for the public good, its largely top-down approach often excludes marginalized groups. This project seeks to address this gap by adopting an approach that prioritizes inclusion, social justice, and diverse perspectives in the design and governance of health data infrastructures.
Ultimately, the project aims to bring together community members—whose data are central to these systems—and the stakeholders developing them. By encouraging collaboration from beginning, the research aspires to create health data systems that are equitable, trustworthy, and responsive to the needs of all, ensuring that these infrastructures serve society as a whole.
Living Foams
An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Regenerative and Waste-Free Cleaning
Our everyday care and cleaning practices create a lot of waste, often relying on products we use once and then throw away. To make a real difference, we need to rethink what we consider “clean enough” and explore materials that work with nature rather than against it. Fundamental to this shift is our relationship with microbes—the tiny organisms in, on and around our bodies. Can we extend our symbiotic relationship with these to develop sustainable and waste-free cleaning practices?
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This project, Living Foams, is an unusual collaboration that brings together ideas from different fields, like biology, materials science, and design, to create novel materials and everyday practices that show potential for such symbiotic relationship. In the first stage, we explore the concept of “living foam,” from a broad range of perspectives including technical viability, human experience and the role of data in representing the interactions on different scales and over time. The project focuses on effective permeations of our disciplinary boundaries by enabling us to work together intensively through workshops and externalize our thoughts and assumptions centered around the Living Foam idea in tangible formats.
Moo-d Swings
Decoding (Human and Other) Animals’ Expression of Their Inner World: Insights into Mental Wellbeing
The mental health of animals—simply put, “how animals feel”—is a vital aspect of their welfare and shapes our societal approach to treating them, from wildlife, farm and companion animals to laboratory and pest species. Positive emotions and good mental health are increasingly recognized as prerequisites for physical health in both animals and humans.
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While research has traditionally focused on negative emotional states (in livestock species) like stress and deprivation, there is growing interest in understanding and recognizing positive mental health and its expression. This project seeks to explore how animals communicate their inner world, using knowledge from human behaviour, communication and psychology to draw parallels and identify species-specific similarities and differences.
The goal is to investigate how animals express complex emotions (such as joy, social support, love or grief), and to develop innovative approaches that go beyond traditional methods focused solely on fear and stress. By bridging physiological, behavioural, psychological, and communication sciences, this project aims for a holistic understanding of animal lives (e.g. How does sleep influence the intensity of emotions experienced and their corresponding expression?). It will explore responses and expressions to e.g. social support, losses, music offering fresh insights into the communication and assessment of mental wellbeing in animals.
Navigating the Nuances of Plant-Based Proteins in the Dutch Food System
Balancing Health, Environmental Sustainability, and Culture
This study aims to understand the benefits and challenges that come with the increasing popularity of (ultra-processed) plant-based foods and how they affect people, animals, and the environment. As more people choose plant- based proteins, it’s important to look at how these foods impact our nutrition, the planet, society, and the economy. We will investigate areas like how these foods influence mental and physical health, their cost and affordability, and how sustainable they are in terms of health, money, the environment, and cultural factors.
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The project will also consider what changes in policies and industry practices are needed to support healthy and sustainable protein choices, such as using a wider variety of protein-rich ingredients in plant-based foods. By focusing on these factors and analysing existing data, this research aims to provide a clearer understanding of the wider effects of plant-based food systems. This can help develop strategies that balance health, sustainability, and ethical considerations in how we produce food.
Shareable Health Data Dashboard with a Use Case in Social Support for Grief Recovery
Computer and data scientists often imagine an ideal world where data insights are fully realized, privacy is absolute, and individuals have complete control over their data. Yet, today’s reality is far from this vision. Governance and artificial intelligence actors often lack coordination, and ethical principles like privacy and data protection are frequently overlooked due to insufficient or ambiguous standards. Meanwhile, data collection, reuse, sharing, and linking continue without clear oversight or responsible storage practices.
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In this project, we address these challenges by focusing on data visualization, control, and privacy in the mental health sector. Mental health data are often inaccessible or deleted, leaving clients without insights into their progress. Yet, tracking this dynamic phenomenon over time is crucial for personal growth, especially when switching providers or moving across borders.
Our interdisciplinary team will develop an interactive visualization dashboard to enhance understanding of mental health data. Co-designed by clients, support networks, and healthcare professionals, this tool empowers users to gain insights, foster collaboration, and improve continuity of care. By making mental health data visible to the primary stakeholder—the client—we aim to support better outcomes and more effective interventions.