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User experience with public products needs special attention considering the specific context. Different from other consumer or personal products that users own, public products do not belong to the user; they are shared with and used in front of other people. Thus, different concerns and problems are incorporated affecting the user experiences. This thesis dwells on the effects of presence of other people on user-public product interaction. The relationships between social context, users’ feelings, and task performances constitute the basis of the thesis. These relationships were investigated by consulting to the literature, but mainly by conducting three empirical studies. All these studies revealed that the presence of other people affects the users’ feelings and task performances greatly.

Contact between neighbours is a logical starting point for making a neighbourhood a pleasant place to live. A scientific research has shown that the area in streets where most contact between neighbours takes place is the hybrid zone. Hybrid zones are the zones between one’s private space (ones house) and the public space (the street); things like gardens, personalized sidewalks etc. This graduation thesis is intended to design to stimulate contact between neighbours in streets without a hybrid zone. This thesis is performed as an addition to a research performed by DE ecotecten on the influence of hybrid zones on communication between neighbours. In order to design something which fits the users’ needs and habits an extensive context analysis is done by using among others, generative techniques, data gathering through crowdsourcing and literature. This context analysis has the purpose to understand everything that has to do with being neighbours, and the experience one has with his street. To find out what the differences could be between different neighbourhoods, and what factors influence its specific contact atmosphere, three different neighbourhoods have been taken as research area in which a total of 20 residents have participated; Blijdorp, Bospolder and Pendrecht. Blijdorp is a mostly “white”, safe and friendly neighbourhood with relatively high educated residents. Bospolder and Pendrecht are both very multicultural neighbourhoods. They are so called “probleem wijken”. Although the last two neighbourhoods seem to be demographically like each other, they differ on architecture. The conclusion that can be drawn from the context analysis is that the best neighbour contact is a modest form of contact. Contact consisting of saying hello, a little chat now and then, and some extra neighbour favours with your direct neighbours. Its main function is to keep up the good atmosphere in the street. Saying “hello” actually means “I want to have it nice here”. Saying “hello” is showing your good intentions. It turned out that we all wish for a street with such good modest contact. In Blijdorp they can imagine this dream street with their current neighbours but one of the problems is that they are busy people, not able to spend much time on the street and so not meeting each other often. This in contrary with Bospolder and Pendrecht, where most people cannot imagine this dream street with their current neighbours. The contact atmosphere in these last two neighbourhoods is one of avoiding each other to avoid contact. It seems plausible that the different neighbourhoods will need a different type of design to solve the problems. The causes of lack of contact in Blijdorp are partly created by the lack of a good hybrid zone. In Bospolder and Pendrecht the reasons for lacking contact are to a big extant attributable to the attitude of the people and only to a small extent to the absence of a hybrid zone. To keep within the scope of the research of DE ecotecten it was decided to design for the neighbourhood Blijdorp in this thesis. The design goal to design for Blijdorp is: to offer opportunities to show your good intentions for the street on own initiative. These opportunities are lacking nowadays because the people in Blijdorp don’t have enough opportunities to greet each other, and because of many upstairs houses, not many people can make a façade yard and show their good intentions in that way. In order to reach the goal an interaction vision was made which resulted in three concepts. A. Streetboxes: all neighbours in one street have the key to a shared showcase. It can be used to give, show, inform, ask etc. B. Street shares: Neighbours can buy a piece of a new product for the street, designed by one of the neighbours, and get their name printed on it. C. Save for a tile: One can save for a customizable street tile at the local shops. After an evaluation with a focus group it is decided to explorer the Streetbox concept further: A multifunctional concept which offers opportunities for individual actions on a collective concern without feeling patronized. Through testing the basic interactions in a real street with real residents it turned out the concept was very much liked, and people would find enough purposes to use it, but they felt a bit uncomfortable acting around the Street box. The associations one has with the concept are very important and should be one of “being proud and independent”. To keep the design realistic for possible future realization of the concept it was chosen to keep it simple and basic. Something which is almost innovative in these digital times, but very natural for contact with neighbours who are after all very close by. The final design is called de Straathoek . De Straathoek is a “corner” situated at a central place in the street. It can be used for all kinds of surprising and convenient matters between neighbours; to give, to share, to ask, to discover and to take what is given by somebody else. De Straathoek can only be used by the residents of the accompanying street. Only they will have the knowledge about the combination of the locks. Everyone who puts something in- or takes something out of the Straathoek, can write a note and/or leave a message on the website; the Straathoek online. De Straathoek contains 4 metal showcase boxes. The showcase boxes are attached to an old construction pile. They each contain a solar cell to power a light which will turn on at night in order to get the real showcase feeling. Besides the Straathoek being an object that offers opportunities to show your good intentions for the street, it also creates little connections between neighbours, and it could function as a meeting place in the street. The 10 days final test of the Straathoek with a mock up model and a website in the Sonmansstraat in Blijdorp was mostly a success and made a lot of people enthusiastic, though some recommendations for future design will be made with regards to the website and some other practical adjustments. Because of so many enthusiastic responses from people who believe a real version will soon be placed in their street, it was decided to try and make it a reality. However, it is not a design anybody can make any money with and the municipality doesn’t have enough subsidies to cover the costs. A solution for this problem could be crowdfunding. The Straathoek is an ideal concept to test the possibilities of crowdfunding for urban issues with. A newly seen phenomenon, which is still in an experimental phase, but might be promising. If enough money is raised and the municipality gives permission, Blijdorp will be the first neighbourhood with a Straathoek in its streets, this summer.

Due to the demographic shift and aging population, the number of the seniors with cognitive impairments is increasing. In taking care of these seniors, caregivers experience both financial and emotional burdens. This project studies three care parties of this special group of people, who take care of the seniors with a mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in home settings at an early stage of disease, including case managers, home nurses and family caregivers. Main goal of this project is to design a tool to improve the communication and collaboration between them. The insights of how caregivers experience the MCI was gained through three steps of researches: literature research, field research and in-depth research. The field research is extensively carried out in different care settings to get to know the care system and involved people. And in-depth research is further studied the needs and wishes of people in experiencing MCI. Through visiting and interviewing a lot of people, I found the three care parties are differently involved in the cooperative work. Their needs and preferences have much variation in coping with caregiving. The shared information among them is divided into common information and non-common information. To satisfied all the three parties needs as much as possible, the design starts from solving the problem in the current situation: caregivers have miscommunication in informing caregiving activities and updating senior’s conditions using notebook. The design challenge is: To better support the communication and collaboration between caregivers by using an engaging tool. Three features are set as the design visions: in-control, friendly and connected. After exploring four design directions, I found it is crucial to develop a solution that provides immediate benefit to all stakeholders, the design direction focusing on the common information requirements is selected as the start of the design. With the information framework, the interface development was started by placing the information components of the main interface. The chosen idea is with no particular emphasis on certain information, which applies for three care parties. Following the design visions, the visualization of the final interfaces was discussed to achieve the design challenge of making it easy to use and elaborated eventually. The final design is elaborated into a prototype made by power point and tested with seven users of both professional caregivers and family caregivers. Generally they like the concept and the design. Also gives suggestions in terms of several aspects of design and information customize. Due to time constraints, only three points on the main interface, history interface and settings are refined. And the other suggestions are left for recommendation for the further study.

Thanks to advances in technology a time has arrived where it is possible to generate energy by virtually everyone for a competitive price. To produce energy on a small scale, fossil fuels are unattractive because energy can be extracted from them more efficiently on a larger scale. For technologies such as solar photovoltaic panels, there is no scale limitation. For that reason alone, solar panels are an attractive means to generate energy for households. Nevertheless, experts or people with good background knowledge are needed to install and run such an energy production facility at home. So for laymen users without ‘special’ knowledge, the idea of personal energy production might not be very appealing. I believe that in order to establish a democracy in the energy market every user in the system should be able to become an active player and use technologies to generate energy. Is such a change in ‘users’ role’ easy to achieve? In the current energy market, ‘not’! Energy as medium is very abstract and does not carry any tangible form and is therefore very hard to relate to a tangible action. In order to motivate people to take an active role in producing and using it, I think the way and the form we use it, should have more relation with human nature. In order to do that, first the current understanding regarding ‘energy production and consumption’ of users should be explored.The so called ‘prosumer’ is introduced, which combines producer and consumer in one user. In this project, after a thorough exploration of the current place of the user in the energy market, I create a concept- which I name Ampul- that aims to connect personal or small-scale energy production with people’s domestic environment in a meaningful and natural manner. The Concept House1, which was built in Heijplaat, Rotterdam under a European founded project to explore the user perception, involvement, understanding and acceptance of newly introduced sustainable technologies, is used as a context to test the created concept with actual users.