Lavinia Marin

Research Projects

Active Projects

The Embodied Ethics Lab: A Multi-Modal Toolkit for Teaching Responsible Anticipation in Engineering Ethics Education

NRO Comenius Programme · Teaching Fellow grant · 2026–2028

This project develops four interconnected embodied exercises to transform engineering ethics from an abstract reasoning topic to a lived, memorable experience — adding bodily movement, senses, and imagination techniques. The Embodied Ethics Lab starts from engineering students’ difficulty imagining the societal impacts of emerging technologies. The suite of exercises targets expanding moral imagination through sensory and embodied teaching techniques, aimed at students struggling to connect abstract ethics with technical artefacts, and at neurodiverse learners requiring multi-modal engagement.

Each exercise functions independently while together they build incrementally toward refining several ethical competencies: moral imagination, anticipatory competencies, and sensitivity to stakeholders. The suite will be deployed in an ethics elective course at TU Delft, master’s level, in a way that allows it to be adopted as a module in other courses — positioning TU Delft as a leader in embodied ethics pedagogy, with a path to implementation across other Dutch engineering programmes.

Comenius TUD fellows page on the Teaching Academy website →

Developing a Hybrid Tool for Value Extraction from Social Media-Sourced Textual Corpora

Delft Design for Values Institute · Seed Project· 2026–2027

Social media contain a wealth of user-generated data concerning values and norms. Conventional value identification and extraction processes require significant technical expertise, confining their use in education and interdisciplinary research. This project develops a hybrid Natural Language Processing tool to extract values from social media-sourced textual corpora, combining domain-specific embedding-based model training with user-friendly LLM-based prompt engineering. We aim for both validated extraction of heritage values in urban contexts and scalable application to new domains such as health and nutrition. The datasets and the tool will be used in research and education activities and published open source.

Project members: Nan Bai, Yan Zhou, Lavinia Marin
View project on the DDfV website →

Completed Projects

Epistemic agency for online and offline contexts · ESDIT consortium project
ESDIT (the ethics of socially disruptive technologies) was a 10-year research project across a consortium of 6 Dutch universities, studying how key philosophical and moral concepts are changed and challenged by new technologies. My focus was the change brought to our epistemic lives by online social platforms, intertwined with changes to our moral lives — how online social environments challenge the way we relate to others as knowers, in ways detrimental to epistemic agency at both the individual and group level.
Comet 3.0 · 4TU.CEE, 2024–2025
A two-year project turning the theoretical insights from COMET 1.0 into concrete experiential exercises, in a manner similar to COMET 2.0, working towards an EEE Ecosystem. Combining fundamental and qualitative research to further develop an Experiential Engineering Ethics Framework.
Comet 2.0 · 4TU.CEE, 2022–2023
Working with Janna van Grunsven, Trijsje Franssen, Andrea Gammon, Sabine Roeser, and Neelke Doorn on the COMET project, reconfiguring the future of engineering ethics education at TU Delft — both retrospective, looking back at 20 years of integrating ethics into the curriculum, and prospective, proposing best practices going forward.
Critical thinking for online environments · LEaDingFellows (MSCA COFUND), 2020–2022
An individual grant under LEaDingFellows, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND programme. Researched the material, technological, and social conditions for critical thinking — collective thinking, affordances for thinking such as digital devices and online technologies, the role of emotions in thinking, and hindrances to thinking — aiming to conceptualise critical engagement with online information so as to empower regular users to tackle misinformation on Social Networking Sites.
Ethics Education for Engineers · SURF / 4TU.Ethics, 2019–2022
A collaboration between TU/e (lead), TU Delft, UT, and WUR under 4TU.Ethics, developing materials for ethics education for engineers (Bachelor and Master). Ethics education is a structural part of the four TUs’ curricula, largely based on case-based exercises. The project published around 60 ethical case-based exercises openly for reuse across the participating institutions, via the open-source repository edusources. Cases collected can be found here.