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In this project, the interactions between parents and their children, while performing daily activities were researched, as well as their opinions on energy saving and playing games together. Using these insights, a product had to be designed that fits within the current activities at Philips and that brings together parents and their children in their attempts to reduce their energy consumption. The focus for this product was on something fun that parents and children could do together. This design had to be evaluated, in order to assess its effectiveness to support behaviour change and family fun, but also to gain more insights in people’s needs and wishes towards sustainable family fun for future Philips projects.

The main question in this study is: “How can the distributed collaborative work system as it exists in drilling operations be improved from the perspective of the people involved concerning their context of information, communication and location during monitoring? ” Well-presented and well-understood data can improve the resilience of the system, since people have a higher awareness of the ongoing process. A system view is used to get an overview and understanding of the different important elements in the collaborative work system. In the user research this is further narrowed down to a focus on the monitoring task. The first two chapters describes the project, the context of oil and gas, a short description of the most important work tasks for drilling and completions teams onshore: planning, monitoring and troubleshooting. Three relevant themes concerning the distributed work system are addressed: collaboration, technology and the different environments used. The different people involved in distributed drilling are spread over different locations: one group of people is based offshore and the other people onshore are dispersed over different companies and locations as the operators’ office, the service companies and the rig contractor. All managerial people involved have a video conference twice day for updates and plans. Literature study on the subjects of distributed and collaborative work indicates human factors to consider. Such as the quality of experience between the user and collaborative technology: social ergonomics and team factors that show effects on asymmetry within and between teams on the different levels of information and awareness. Subject of this study is data monitoring, thus the theory of ecological interface design describes a framework for designing interfaces in complex environments. Users can be supported in their monitoring task by a representation of data on different levels of abstraction. This evokes full understanding of the system. By presenting higher levels of abstraction of data, the cognitive workload is reduced. When necessary the user can still zoom in on the detailed level of the process. A user- and context study, context mapping (Sleeswijk Visser, 2005), is executed to get an understanding of the work system from different perspectives and all the interrelated parts. People on different levels and positions in the organisation participated. In this method participants are involved by mapping their own context by means of small explorative tasks and making pictures of their work environment. Research results are shaped into eight different personas to represent the different perspectives. The user research further showed different types of data and types of data users. In most situations more information is not necessarily better, it could lead to distraction or an overload. Attention should be paid to present the right information to the right people on the right moment. The presentation of the data is an important factor in the perceived quality. From the different user groups the design proposals aim on two types of users: the driller whose actions are directly related to the data, and on onshore engineers, which monitoring behavior is characterized as ‘glancing use’. In conjunction with improved data presentations consistency is a key factor in creating matching user expectations on the systems output. Both the visible and invisible structure of the system, are important for user acceptance. Based on the above results three design directions are defined: the drillers dashboard, onshore data presentation and the role of the collaborative environment as part of the system. In the drillers environment an increased amount of available data resulted in more information to fit in an unchanged environment ergo a misfit in required functionality and design on the level of positions of elements and inconsistency in handling and layout. The information, alarms and tools are not optimally positioned in respect with one another. An information and alarm strategy should be defined to apply on existing environments, on environments to be designed, to prepare them for the future. This system approach must assure that every new element added is considered part of the system. Established standard such as ISO 11064 can be used. Maybe say out of reach? Onshore engineers primary task is to plan new wells, during this planning offshore operations are ongoing. Part of the engineers work is to keep track of these rig processes during the day. For that they monitor real time data and there are morning meetings.The interfaces used for real time data monitoring present sensor and machine data as individual numbers, gauges and graphs. Users have to assimilate those to get full understanding. Designs for new data widgets are proposed: The first proposed widget: a dynamic image is developed to summarize all valuable rig data in one picture. Users now can recognise the pattern instead of having to assimilate all separate data feeds. The image is created during co-creation sessions with people from the actual user group. The second proposal handles with the fact that not all actions from offshore influencing the data (e.g. change in mud pit volume) are presented on the monitoring screens. As it is necessary to complete the picture a widget is proposed to represent offshore actions as small notifications, to make sure the information is complete and equally distributed over the people involved. This notification system is inspired by the formerly used Public Announcement system on the rig. Onshore engineers work five days a week whilst offshore processes go on 24/7. This difference in working times results in onshore engineers monitoring data at home as well. And during the five days in the office they spent only a small amount of their time behind a desk. For these reasons consideration should be given to the application of data on mobile devices. Mobile devices have the opportunity to integrate information and communication appliances: linked to a server (cloud) this information can be centrally coordinated. Mobile devices have small (touch) screens and therefore require a different approach to interfaces design. Dedicated applications have to be developed.

This master thesis report with the topic “participation and co-creation in the public domain”, represents the final project of the master Design for Interaction at the faculty Industrial Design Engineering, University of Technology Delft (TUDelft) and was executed for the STT Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends in The Hague (STT). The project is introduced in chapter one where the design brief, involved parties and project process is elaborated on. The goal of the initial design brief was “design a means that facilitates people with the possibility to participate and co-create, with other citizens and authority, in the Dutch public domain of 2030”. To reach this goal a process similar to the VIP method was followed. First the current situation was deconstructed, whereupon the future situation was constructed and a concept was designed. Chapter two investigates on the term crowdsourcing, the topic of the initiating exploratory study of STT and the starting point of this thesis. There was investigated how the method of crowdsourcing currently is applied in the following sectors: private internet organisations, commercial businesses, design teams and in the public domain. In these various fields similar processes and guidelines were differentiated. Chapter three maps the current situation of the public domain. Roughly five parties were differentiated: authority, citizens, media, commercial companies and public private parties. Current policy-making procedures and the influence of citizens in every step were investigated. Due to lack of accurate information and feedback, which is in large extend caused by the media, communication in these procedures falls short. The majority of citizens is willing to participate, yet does not see how they are able to make a difference. The several motivators and barriers to stimulate or stop people from participating were mapped. Finally there was concluded that authority can learn from commercial companies and public private parties. Organisations in which crowdsourcing and end user participation already are applied on larger scale. In chapter four there has been decided to solely focus on citizens and their personal needs and wishes. In order to do so, six personas were made for this thesis. These personas were based on literature and represent Dutch society. These personas were the starting point for chapter five, where was investigated which factors people need to participate. This investigation was split in two parts: a generative research and a research on existing initiatives. Both researches focussed on four factors: participation, ability, motivation and satisfaction. The generative research was done with a focus group of six participants. Who first were sensitised and in a session were asked to collectively brainstorm about their neighbourhood and collectively choose a situation to work out in a 3D Lego play collage. The steps of the generative process, resembled the steps of a policy-making process. After the generative session, twenty eight, existing participatory initiatives were examined. Some of these initiatives had potential and their aspects were instructive, while the majority of the initiatives was more suitable to find out what should be avoided in the future. In chapter six the result of the both researches were compared and concluded on. The results of the generative session gave insight in the needs and wishes of people, while the results from the research on existing initiatives gave insight in the process and the perspective of authority. From these results it was concluded that people consider participation as the continuous interaction with others in their daily life. They are especially motivated to participate when they personally take interest in a situation. However in order to do so, they need to be enabled to participate. Six enabling participation parameters were found: certainty, communication, freedom, responsibility, sympathy and support. During and after a participation process the level of success gives people a feeling of (dis-)satisfaction. Together these findings formed the main framework and guidelines for the construction phases of the thesis process. Chapter seven describes an interaction vision based on these insights. In this vision the desired interaction and future context of the to be designed means was determined. The vision was used to frame the design space and draw inspiration from. Chapter eight starts with a foundation for idea sketching, where more information was searched on the parameters sympathy and support. In an individual creative session, ideas were sketched and later on clustered in three phases. Four concepts were derived from the final morphological clusters and were elaborated on. After which a confrontation matrix was used to map the strongest points of each of the concepts. Chapter nine describes a first iteration in which the four concepts were merged together. Resulting in a personal document, a cloud-computing structure, with gestural operation and a 3D holographic display to participate directly there and then, in a variety of every day situations. The four participation paths were developed in the form of scenarios, flow-charts and interface frames. Chapter ten evaluates the first iteration of the concept with an evaluation study, executed in the city centre of The Hague. The interface frames were presented on an Ipad and this prototype was accompanied with the scenarios. Eight participants were observed and interviewed, from which valuable conclusions were drawn and recommendations were made. There was concluded that the concept currently could facilitate people with the possibility to participate and co-create. Although there were several aspects that needed improvement. Especially regarding the interface design, falling under the scope of the parameter communication. The recommendations were adopted in chapter eleven, where a second iteration is described. The co-creation paths were merged and a organisational path was added. The interface position was changed, icons were made more elaborate and a new menu structure was designed. While the context and interaction, as described in chapter nine, remained the same. Chapter eleven reflects on the last iteration done for this graduation project and results in the final concept of this master thesis. In the final chapter, chapter twelve, there is reflected on the thesis results from a project perspective and a personal perspective.

Icebreakers are structured activities designed as a tool to build relationships, facilitate sharing information and institute a relaxed environment. These benefits involve the formation of a creative team climate. Among the variety of icebreakers, the game type enhances the sense of teamwork giving the base to forming more effective and productive group works. The multidisciplinary composition of a team increases its creative potential. Considering the design process, creativity takes place during the idea generation stage. This study presents the explorative investigation of the possible impacts of a game-type icebreaker applied as a starter activity of the idea generation process of newly formed design teamwork. The focus was addressed to the team-working atmosphere, the teams’ dynamics and the design outcomes. Six workshops involving teams of four students, two with design-oriented background and two engineering-oriented one, performed a brainstorming session to solve a given design task. Not previous acquaintance among the students was required. By pair of teams, three different workshop conditions were tested: 1) participants were asked to simply brainstorm to generate solutions to the task, 2) they were exposed to the icebreaker game, and 3) they were asked to start brainstorming right after a short personal introduction. The six teams processes and design outcomes were compared among the three brainstorming settings. Protocol and content analysis were carried out of data collected by the videotapes and the sketches of the ideas produced. The aspects leading the discussion of the results were group interactions, cognitive activities of the teams’ design processes and typology of teams’ outcomes with focus on the levels of creativity. The study reveals three main positive effects of the game-type icebreaker: 1) create a collaborative group atmosphere by enhancing the group communication and reducing the tensions; 2) produce effective and collaborative teamwork strategies by structuring the cognitive activities of the teamwork process; and 3) empower the team’s creative thinking potential in the design solution generation. The work ends with a reflection of the benefits of the findings on a broader view, the limitations of the study and suggestion of further research.

The master thesis is focused in the knowledge flow management of a design consultancy. The procedure started with a user research analysing the knowledge flow and communication within the company and the result is website that offers remarkable benefits for the employees of the company and for the company as well. At the end of the design process an evaluation with users was carried out.

In 1881 Hendrik Willem Mesdag painted his famous Panorama of the fishing village of Scheveningen. The panorama covers a cylinder 14 metres high with a circumference of 120 metres. It is in fact an early form of virtual reality, giving the viewer the illusion of participating in life on the seashore. Like a modern Mesdag, Aldo Hoeben, part-time lecturer at the ID-StudioLab of the faculty of Industrial Design, creates digital panoramas that draw the viewer into events such as the funeral of Queen Juliana or a visit to the jungle of a zoo. The techniques used and developed by Hoeben for his panoramas can help designers to visualise their ideas and concepts.

Dozens of television programmes to choose from,hundreds of colours in the paint shop, hundreds of different kinds of red wine at wine merchants or supermarkets. Were simply spoilt for choice. Making the right choice will become easier with the interactive search system developed by researchers at the Industrial Design department of tu delft. What started out as a design tool is turning out to be useful for others as well, from supermarket managers to estate agents. A patent was recently granted.

During the initial stages of the design process, industrial designers often use their private collection of images, magazines, and objects to gather ideas and to discuss matters with their colleagues. These collections are rather like the cabinet of curiosities or wunderkammer that the well-to-do of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries liked to create. Ir. Ianus Keller, a doctorate student at the id-Studiolab of the Industrial Design Engineering faculty of TU Delft, has developed an electronic cabinet of curiosities that enables the designer to concentrate on playing and associating with images to produce new ideas.

This work presents the research into Creating Socionas, a step-by-step approach to building creative understanding of user experience in the early stages of new product development (NPD). Creative understanding is the combination of a rich, cognitive and affective understanding of the other, and the ability to translate this understanding into products and services that are pleasurable and easy to use (Wright and McCarthy, 2005). It draws on information about the user and his/her everyday life, and it includes inspiration for design and empathy or “a feel” for the user. Several approaches to building creative understanding of user experience have been developed over the past years, including critical design, generative design research and empathic design (Sanders, 2006). They have been successfully used by their creators in projects for and with clients in the industry. Despite these successful efforts, designers and user researchers may experience two important challenges when trying to implement and practice the approaches in an industrial organization. The first challenge is to make sense of users’ experiences for design. Recent societal issues and socio-technological developments, including the mass adoption of real-time social media services, have made “the social” an essential topic for design. The social denotes the idea that human activity is fundamentally social, as opposed to individual. In the design research literature, it has been suggested that holistic approaches to understanding user experience that include the social are needed to develop products and services that delight users. However, most existing approaches to understanding user experience for design build on frameworks of user experience that focus on the individual, and leave design teams unequipped for understanding the social. The second challenge is to build creative understanding of user experience in the context of NPD practice. Existing approaches to understanding user experience often suggest that members of a design team adopt the role of user researcher, and directly interact with users to ensure that the user perspective is included in design. In NPD practice this interaction is not always feasible as the user research is frequently sourced from a third party, e.g., an external consultancy or an internal user research team. Thus the users researchers who perform the user research and the design team members who manage the concept design are usually not the same people in NPD practice. This means that the user data that has been gathered in user research needs to be shared with the design team. The richness and basis for building creative understanding is often lost in this process. The current research seeks to address these two challenges; it investigates what design teams need to understand about user experience to develop products that delight users, and how they can build this understanding under the constraints of NPD practice (chapter 1). “Creating Socionas” is proposed as a possible solution. Creating Socionas is an approach to building creative understanding that addresses the two challenges by offering a conceptual framework that helps designers and user researchers to make sense of user experience for design, plus five steps that guide them through the process of building this understanding under the constraints of NPD practice. The approach builds on empathic design – an approach to designing for experience that is characterized by a design attitude of respecting users, being committed to understanding users’ needs and desires, building holistic understanding of users’ activities, and relying on personal insight and creativity (Mattelmäki, 2006). The research into Creating Socionas proceeded through cycles of developing and evaluating the approach in ongoing NPD projects at Philips. Design practice and design theory were closely integrated in the research process. In chapter 2, the research approach is described as research through design, by which I mean, “generating new knowledge or understanding through cycles of developing and evaluating experiential artefacts and process prototypes”. The chapter explains how action research methodology was used as a framework for practicing a research through design approach in addressing the research questions, after which it introduces eight empirical cases at Philips in which instantiations of Creating Socionas were developed and evaluated. The following four chapters explain the development of Creating Socionas and the knowledge and insights that were generated in the projects at Philips. Chapter 3 provides a critical reflection on the use of user-centered design approaches in industry, and the differences between industry and academic research settings. In this chapter, we review the literature of empathic design, and discuss our own experiences with introducing and practicing empathic design in several NPD projects at Philips Research over the past years. Having experimented with empathic design in an industrial context, we experienced success but also encountered eight challenges that relate to discrepancies between the theory of empathic design as described in literature on the one hand, and the application of empathic design in an industrial context on the other. An example is the earlier described discrepancy between empathic design’s advise to engage design team members as multi-disciplinary experts in user research on the one hand, and the common practice of sourcing user research from external consultancies or internal user research teams on the other, which raised questions of who, when and how to engage design team members in user research. Three cultural and methodological changes are proposed for addressing these challenges in the future. These include changing focus (a) from rational approaches to including empathic approaches, (b) from users as informers to users as partners in new product development (NPD) practice, and (c) from being informed of user research to being engaged in user research. The first two changes are consistent with those proposed by Sanders (2006), which endorses our conviction that other industrial organizations face similar challenges when introducing and practicing empathic design. The third dimension is new. It highlights an area of empathic design that is still largely unaddressed in the literature, but may be key in successfully embedding empathic design within an industrial organization. Chapter 4 introduces the concept of “trialogue”. Trialogue is a framework for sharing rich user data in NPD practice that was developed by using Wright and McCarthy’s (2005) concept of dialogue between designer and user to explore the tri-partied interaction between users, user researchers and design teams in NPD practice. Existing approaches to understanding user experience for NPD often assume that designers build creative understanding in direct interaction with users. In NPD practice, the interaction between users and the designers is often mediated by a third party performing the user research. In these cases, the rich user data gathered in user research needs to be shared with designers in ways that enable them to build creative understanding of user experience for design. In chapter 4, we identify and discuss four requirements for successfully building creative understanding in situations of trialogue, after which we discuss five implications of trialogue for sharing user data in NPD practice. One important implication is the active engagement of design teams in reading and interpreting user data for NPD, rather than in gathering user data, as is suggested for situations of dialogue. Creating Socionas builds on this implication. Chapter 5 reports our search for a conceptual framework that design teams could use as thinking tool of the social in empathic design. Despite the fundamentally social nature of life, most existing frameworks intended to generate perspectives of user experience in design still focus on the individual. Therefore, a conceptual framework is needed to sensitize design teams towards both relationality and individuality in designing for user experience. Building on the idea of engaging design teams in reading and interpreting user data for design, we set out to find a conceptual framework that design teams could use as thinking tool of the social in making sense of rich user data. In chapter 5, we review a number of possible frameworks on the basis of literature and describe our experiences in applying candidate frameworks in NPD practice at Philips. A set of criteria for assessing the usefulness of frameworks for empathic design and five groups of frameworks are identified, “special effect theories”, “relational frameworks”, “catalogues”, “metaphors”, and “scaffolds of context”. Activity Theory (AT) (Vygotsky, 1978; Leont’ev, 1978), as a scaffold of context, is found to have the best fit between design teams’ needs in empathic design and the frameworks’ offerings. An important advantage that AT brings is that it addresses the individual’s experience and social context. Having experimented with AT as thinking tool of the social in NPD practice, we found that AT is a potentially powerful framework for structuring, discussing and sharing rich user data in empathic design. Chapter 6 proposes Stanislavsky’s approach to play-acting as an intuitive way for practicing Activity Theory in empathic design. Activity Theory provides a comprehensive framework for analyzing user experience data for design, but is generally considered to be “hard to learn” and “difficult to put into practice”. More intuitive ways are needed for design teams to grapple with AT in interpreting user data for NPD. We found Stanislavsky’s System, an approach to acting that supports actors in the process of embodying and enacting a role (Stanislavsky, 1961), to provide these intuitive ways. In chapter 6, we discuss the conceptual relations between Stanislavsky’s System and Activity Theory, and show how Stanislavsky’s System was used to translate Activity Theory for empathic design in an NPD project at Philips. Our approach in this project was successful in that the design team built creative understanding of user experience from an AT perspective, without perceiving the approach as “too theoretical” or “difficult to grasp”. Chapter 7 consolidates the knowledge and insights from the previous chapters into a five-step approach to building creative understanding of user experience, Creating Socionas. In this chapter, I explain how user researchers and designers in Philips and in similar organizations might implement and practice Creating Socionas, using examples from NPD projects at Philips to illustrate the approach. Looking back on the research into Creating Socionas in chapter 8, I find that Creating Socionas is unique from most other approaches to understanding user experience for design in that the approach (1) sensitizes design teams towards the individual’s experience and social context in building understanding of user experience, (2) explains how design teams can build creative understanding of user experience in situations of trialogue, and (3) combines a conceptual framework that helps design teams to make sense of user experience for design, with a hands-on approach that guides them through the process of building this understanding under the constraints of NPD practice. A limitation of the approach is its transferability; Creating Socionas reliably applies to NPD practices similar to those at Philips only, and practitioners will need to adjust the approach to fit with their own contexts of NPD. Therefore, it is recommended that further research investigates the transferability of the approach. The results of such research may raise confidence in the success factor of Creating Socionas, and may persuade managers and other stakeholders to implement and invest in the approach in their organizations, and thereby develop products and services that resonate with users’ social lives.

The Philips Design Probes are a ‘far-future’ research program aimed at understanding lifestyle post 2020. The program aims at identifying probable systemic shifts in the social and economic domains likely to affect our business and create intellectual property in new areas. By developing future scenarios (narratives) and accompanying concepts (provocations) the Probes team aims at challenging conventional thinking and stimulate debate both inside and outside of Philips Design. This debate helps to develop an understanding of the research domain, which can then be translated back to medium- and short term projects, stimulating people in thinking things can be done in a different way. At first the focus of this project was on finding out how insights on the Electronic Tattoo provocation could be made valuable as a source of inspiration for the internal design community of Philips Design, Therefore the context studies were aimed at the internal and external communication of the Electronic Tattoo provocation and the current insights generation and communication. From these context studies it became clear that the main problem preventing the insights from the provocation being inspiring for the designers was the lack of engagement of the designers with the Design Probes. This lack of engagement is caused by the fact that the designers do not feel they can contribute to the Design Probes and do not see the link with their own work. This is caused by the lack of dialogue between the Probes team and the designers and the limited amount of information the designers get about the purpose of the Design Probes within the innovation strategy of Philips Design and the narrative behind the provocation. These findings led to the formulation of the design focus for the concept development, which is on the design of a communication tool to stimulate dialogue between the designers and the Probes team, make it easy to share inspirational materials with colleagues and with that enable the inspirational information from the Design Probes to spread through the company. The communication tool should match the current way of handling inspirational materials of the designers, allowing for serendipitous encounters with inspirational materials outside their project scope, stimulating critical thinking about the proposed future possibilities and the development of their own point of view about it. The information from the Design Probes should be communicated when the designers are looking for inspiration themselves at their personal workspace, as part of their daily work. When looking at the insights, it is concluded that contextual insights should be generated for the Electronic Tattoo provocation as they are currently not available. The contextual insights allow the designers to connect to the experiences of the consumers as well as their own, which helps them to develop their own opinion about the issues addressed in the probe narrative and the insights. Three concepts have been developed; the Probe Sketch Tables, Personal Probe Book and Probe Talks App. The concepts are based on the same principles,but make use of different media. For the evaluation an experiential prototype was made of one of the concepts and tested at Philips Design in Eindhoven. The conclusions from the evaluation are that the concepts complement each other and should be implemented together, as they all match different preferences of handling inspirational materials of the designers.

Time management is an essential part of every company, and the amount of energy devoted to keeping a business running smoothly can be surprisingly large. To keep track of the relevant factors there are a variety of management tools available, with different focuses and purposes. Companies tend to use a mix of these tools to fit their specific needs, and also use self-created tools such as whiteboards and checklists. Because time management is scattered over many tools, there is limited flexibility to update a project when something changes. The majority is text and numerically based, which makes them slower to update, and means that people cannot gain an overview of their situation without reading a lot. In the case of designers, the complexity of the situation increases. Most tools are suited to businesses with well-structured processes. This doesn’t match with the needs of designers, who have a less structured process. Expert designers tend to work intuitively, so time plans are followed ‘opportunistically’; only for as long as they are of benefit. Task durations are difficult to estimate, since there is great variation between projects. Also, one good idea can change a whole plan, so the need for a flexible tool is even greater. To have such a tool, that was used consistently, would also mean that planning knowledge could be recorded accurately for use in the future. Primary research conducted at Kiss the Frog Productions B.V. (referred to as KTF) confirmed these assumptions, and revealed deeper insights into what planning factors make a project effective and satisfying to work on. Using the results of this study, a prototype was created for a new time management system. This prototype was tested with four design companies to gain further insights for its development. The end result, TimeTrace, is a living, breathing time planning software for design companies, which gives an accurate visualisation of what is happening with all design projects at all times. The default screen is an overview, showing a visualisation of all projects. This screen is used to create popup windows, which extract the relevant information needed for planning activities, by any person at any moment. All visualisations can be directly manipulated to change the plan, without the need to type in a lot of text/numbers. Information is synchronised to update across the whole system. TimeTrace addresses the problems and insights uncovered throughout the project, and in doing so effects changes to three paradigms of current time management processes: Visual not Numerical: unlike most management programs, TimeTrace does not present project data using numbers. All time-related information is represented through visual proportions, and elements such as people and projects are represented through icons and colour codes. This makes it fast to ‘read’ and flexible to adjust. It is also more in keeping with how people perceive the passing of time; as proportions of their day orweek; not numerical figures. Shared Responsibility: the usual management scheme for companies is top-down; project managers make the decisions. TimeTrace encourages managers to benefit from their employees knowledge, by providing a system that can be contributed to by everyone, and ensures that everyone stays informed. Situational Awareness: Plans are usually used to provide a framework at the beginning of a project, and are intended to be followed as closely as possible, and updated when necessary. For designer, this close following of the plan is not a reality, so TimeTrace instead puts the focus on offering continuous situational awareness. Instead of making decisions based on the initial plan, it is possible to make decisions based on the reality of how the project and organisation is running at any given moment. It stays up to date by doubling as a financial system; when tasks are confirmed for financial purposes, they are fed back into the system and used to renew the visualisations. TimeTrace is also a very important record for the company. It stores all past project information, so that it may be of help in making future plans. Information about the usual duration of tasks is offered as suggestions, when a new plan is being made. It also keeps a record of the typical process of the company; by detailing the main phases and sub-phases of a project, project managers and designers are reminded of the full range of the tool box they can draw on for every project.

This report presents an awareness display for supporting family carers of independently living seniors. The focus was on providing awareness and promoting peace of mind. It was developed as part of a graduation project. In a literature research, family care, context awareness systems and state of the art were studied. User research was conducted to further explore the user context and the awareness needs of the family carers. The results of the literature research and user research were used to design a concept of the Family Care Book. In a field study, the final design was tested with end-users, in order to determine if the Family Care Book is able to support the family carer’s awareness and provide peace of mind. The increase of senior citizens will put pressure on the professional care system since the number of people providing the care is expected to stay the same. Senior citizens often prefer to live independently in a familiar setting. The trend of seniors living independently is recognized and supported by the government. Senior citizens living on their own can help lower the pressure on the care system. Aging often makes it harder for senior citizens to complete normal daily activities. Therefore it is very important for an independently living senior citizen in the need of a support to have a good supporting net. The family carers, the friends and family, often play an important role especially when a support starts to be needed. Family carers need to be aware of the senior citizens situation in order to provide care in the right way and pick up on changes in the situation. It often is difficult for family carers to be aware which causes them to worry about the senior. Often a balance needs to be found between the senior citizen’s desire to live independently in a familiar setting versus the need for a safe living situation. Awareness systems are considered a promising means to support independently living seniors and their caregivers. Currently there are remote monitoring products to capture everyday routines. However acceptance issues arise since the current options do not fit the need and pose a tension between privacy and independence. The results of the literature research confirmed context awareness systems as a promising means to support independently living seniors and their caregivers. The challenge is thus to design a device that incorporates contextawareness technology and fits the need of the family carer and is accepted by both the family carer and the senior. Literature suggested that when seniors notice the benefits of a technology, they are more likely to accept this technology. In an operational research conducted among 8 target users, the needs and wishes of this group were examined. This research provided insight into the lives and worries of the family carers. The research consisted of a contextmapping study and semi-structured interviews. The information need as described by literature and the user research are consistent. The user research confirmed that worries can cover all levels of human needs identified by Maslow. However the awareness displays developed in previous researches never provided awareness of all 5 levels of human needs. Often only the bottom two needs are monitored. The contextmapping study shows awareness is also wanted on all levels of human needs. The exact information can cover all human needs. Based on the literature research, research with the family carers, the awareness needed of the seniors situation to promote peace of mind and how to present the information was determined. The awareness needs included a combination of monitoring sensor data and communication. This combination provides a broader look on the situation and includes the senior in the system. Based on the awareness needs and findings from the user research and related work a final design was developed. The final design is named the Family Care Book. A journal metaphor is used to convey the information to the user. The interaction is based on the personal interest social intimates have for each other and the worries connected to an aging senior. The Family care book does not only tell the family carer when things are going wrong, but also shows when things are going right. The Family Care Book gives an overview of the senior citizens day. Sensors are used to provide a view on the senior’s day and indicate when it is going considerably different from normal. Communication through messages is used to share experiences, messages and feelings. In order to verify if the application reached its goal, a prototype was built and tested. The prototype was developed to enable the basic functionalities needed to test if the Family Care Book could help provide awareness and support peace of mind. A field test was conducted with two couples consisting of a family carer and the independently living senior they cared for. The family carer was given an iPhone and the senior had a touch screen in her home with the Family Care Book application. Unfortunately the validation of the test results is limited. In the first test the participants close living distance made the need for awareness support very low. During the second test many problems occurred with conveying the sensor information. The two participant couples involved in the field test confirmed the possible usefulness of the concept. - the Family Care Book is appreciated by the current family carers - the Family Care Book contributes to the family carer’s awareness - the Family Care Book will strengthen peace of mind. At the same time it is important to keep in mind that it has little value when there is a small distance between the carer and the carer receiver. Secondly basic computer skills are needed to be capable of using the Family Care Book. A larger-scale user study with a better functioning prototype is needed in order to collect significant results, these preliminary findings do suggest that the approach taken in terms of a portable awareness display which allows sharing practical information with social communication seems promising.

This graduation study investigates how (methods like) contextmapping can be applied within a large multinational company such as Philips. This Master Thesis shows the development of a research method for Philips to obtain and leverage rich experience research in the early value creating stages of its product development processes. The method developed is based on the method of Contextmapping (Sleeswijk Visser et al., 2005). This method has been developed at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. Contextmapping aims to support the obtainment of knowledge about the contextual aspects that influence the end-users experience during product use. Next to that it offer an approach to analyse the data and inform and inspire project teams with the experience knowledge obtained. During this graduation project the conventional contextmapping method has been adjusted to meet the demand within Philips. Two major adjustments have been made to the conventional contextmapping method, to make the method applicable. The first difference is that the members of a project team themselves analyse the rich experience data, instead of (end-)user researchers. Next to that an online tool has been developed to support these analysis. Next to that the tool enables the project team members to present and discuss the rich experience knowledge (obtained individually) with each other and translate this shared knowledge into concepts during a group meeting. This report can be valuable for those interested in (method like) contextmapping and the implementation (of such consumer centered methods) in a large multinational product development company. Next to that the support in the analysis of the rich experience data (deriving from such methods) by a digital tool or web-applications and the support of consumer centricity during ideation workshops have been treated extensively in this report.

Sigma Coatings is specialised in architectural coatings for the professional painting industry. Sigma’s vision is to provide services, products, knowledge and skills for the protection and beautification of our sustainable environment. Sigma Coatings is high valued by the end user, the painter. The biggest competitor of Sigma, Sikkens, is higher valued at the influencers, like architects, project managers, colour consultants. Sigma’s objective is to increase brand awareness at the influencers. The strategy to reach this is to become a colour authority for these influencers. An exploratory research was executed by studying the company, the brand, the customers, the colour products and the context. To complete the exploratory study, two research projects were set up: research to the feelings and experiences of Sigma’s sales force towards colour and research to explore the feelings and experience of the influencers. Influencers are the stakeholders in construction or renovation projects. Stakeholders of eight hospital construction or renovation projects were interviewed. To complete the research stakeholders of four other projects were interviewed as well. The interviewees provided valuable insights in the colour decision making process. The interviewed sales force employees provided valuable insights about their feelings and experiences towards colour. The exploratory research showed that Sigma’s current colour message is inconsistent and incoherent. The insights in the sales force showed that colour is not implemented in the sales force employees mind and that colour is not seen as a strategic tool to improve customer relationships. The external research showed a gap in colour attention between the architect and the project manager: they both think that the other party will start talking about colour. These insights have resulted in a strategy which starts with creating a consistent, coherent colour message. The second step is to show the sales force the added value of colour so that they can use colour as a strategic tool to improve customer relationships. The sales force needs to be educated in the effects of the use of colour and the current colour tools Sigma has. To support this step, an intranet for Sigma’s sales force is introduced. The third step of the strategy focuses on the attention gap; project managers will be made aware of the effects of colours on users with the result that they will start talking about colour with their project team. The fourth step will take care of that every need for colour support will be answered by Sigma. Sigma already has a large colour product portfolio, though two products are developed to complete the portfolio in answering all the needs. Finally, when all these steps are submitted, Sigma can claim colour authority with a promotion campaign. The strategic steps are translated in practical activities, which are plotted in a roadmap. The roadmap contains 13 activities and a promotion campaign. The development of the roadmap was past the development of the overall strategic plan, including the development of three products and describing the implementation into Sigma’s organization and onto the market. The strategic plan was evaluated to identify risks and recommendations were made for the further development of the roadmap and strategy. Although the roadmap looks promising and the risks involved with the implementation appear to be low, the developed products ideally have to be tested by doing research to the reaction of the targeted customers on the products.

This report shows the development of a tool, which will enable designers to start collaborative design projects. The project is executed at the company Veeel, a design agency in Amsterdam. Veeel has brought together a large pool of designers on their online platform Designrider, which gives them access to a wealth of technical knowledge, experience, skills and creativity. The designers can enrol for projects provided by Veeel on Designrider. However, the designers wait until a project is placed, they do not interact with each other in the meantime. This can lead to missed opportunities. It is important for designers to build a strong network, which they can use in their search for projects. A dynamic network will aid them in achieving larger projects, which is difficult for an individual designer and enables the designer to do what they do best. Therefore, designers should be supported in becoming more active on Designrider to start collaborative design projects. These findings have lead to developing a tool that changes the wait and see attitude of the designers in Designrider. In the analysis phase, social networks, communities and the importance of building trust among each other before sharing information with new connections are investigated. The insights from this literature study are used as a base to research and understand the current situation of Veeel, Designrider and the designers. It became clear that it is not only about providing design projects but designers are searching for something else as well. Designrider is lacking three needs to strengthen the ties in ones network, namely projects, triggers and social communication. The outcomes of the analysis were transformed into a design vision. The design vision suggests that the designers need to feel confident enough to show their potential and should help each other during their design process. These insights were translated into an interaction vision, which explains the intended interaction of the to be developed tool. The design vision forms a framework for the conceptualization part of the project where all the gained information is translated into different ideas. The generated ideas were tested in two different user studies both offline and online. The insights of the user studies have led to the development of a concept idea for the tool. The tool supports designers to share their process with other designers in different steps. A designer can start up a new project; others can become interested and start following the project after being accepted. They will be more involved in the project. Updates of the project will keep the rest of the designers involved. When the designer who started a new project needs help, he or she can turn to his followers or an expert. The final result will be visible for all the designers of Designrider when a project is finished. When the project is really interesting, Veeel could invite a designer for the event DesignerDrinks. At this event, the invited designer can present his or her project. The others can become interested, inspired and during a drink they can get more connected to each other. Although further research is needed, it can be concluded that the designers will feel more confident showing their potential if they can control who sees their process. This will change the wait and see attitude of the designers. The new tool supports the three needs: projects, triggers and social communication, both online and offline. The triggers are initiated by the start of a new project. The new project and its updates initiate conversations and enables starting collaboration. Due to the collaborative design projects, weak ties become strong. This will build trust, connections will appear and information streams will be possible. Finally, a recommendation to Veeel is made. As a start, Veeel should change the proposition of Designrider. Instead of providing a platform where designers can find projects it should be “Expose, share, start collaborative design projects and become part of a dedicated community of designers.”

Launching a new product involves the efforts from design development and market development, which requires cross-functional collaboration. When the novelty of a project is high, it would be rather difficult for co-workers to cross boundaries since the shared knowledge is relatively limited. These knowledge barriers might lead to communication problems, which decrease the efficiency of collaboration. The process of collaboration requires certain facilitation to bring up the team performance. Some artifacts are created to help design engineers to present their research outcomes from new product development, such as prototypes, documents and technical notes. However, these artifacts still seem insufficient to support cross-functional collaboration. Based on the upper mentioned problem, this graduation project aims at finding a design solution to help design engineers to “sell” their ideas or designs to internal stakeholders via artifacts, thus to reduce the barriers in collaboration. “Selling” ideas and designs is a process of sharing understanding between different disciplines. The main approach of this project is research through design: testable prototypes were built to reflect on the finding of research. The project started with a contextual understanding, followed with a literature search and a context study. A cross-functional team was selected as the target for the research. The grounded theory method was used for data analysis. According to the findings of literature study, there are two approaches for knowledge integration in R&D collaboration. One approach is to traverse knowledge by transferring, translating and transforming it, thus the individuals with different expertise could share and assess each other’s knowledge by crossing knowledge boundaries. The other approach is to transcend knowledge instead of clarifying the knowledge differences. Actions are taken to minimize the knowledge difference and aim at finding solutions for design problems. Thus the new product development could be done without understanding tacit knowledge in depth. The studies on the R&D team showed that telling good stories of their research outcomes is quite essential during new product development. To convince clients, design engineers need to show how they take the feedback from clients into account, and how they manage risks to ensure that the concept could be launched in the market successfully. In addition, besides knowledge barriers, creative tension also exists among stakeholders. Design engineers have to face various choices and deal with uncertainties. Based on the upper mentioned findings, six design directions were generated, which would be further explored in the design phase. To better guide the design phase, a design statement was generated, which is to design an artifact/ artifacts that help R&D team to better demonstrate their research and development process, thus to improve the communication among stakeholders and working performance of the team. Increasing interactions and presenting rich and clear information in the new product development process are the two focus of the final design. Further context research was conducted to narrow down the design direction. In the end, a system design was delivered. There three main usages of the system, which are rich research outcome demonstration, flexible prototype presentation, and facilitating effective and direct discussion. The system design consists of four items: the Container A, the Container B, the Carrier and the Wall rack. The Container A is a paper box for storing finished prototypes. The Container B is used as a temporary storage for the prototypes that are still in use. The carrier is designed for users to carry prototypes around in a decent and safe way. The wall rack is designed for organizing prototypes storage and presenting research outcomes. The design could encourage the users to present and make use of the research outcomes, and noticeably, it could bring different roles involved in the project together. Furthermore, by gathering and organizing information, design engineers could be aware of the situation and have a better understanding of common knowledge.

In this thesis I investigate how to support designing the appearance of materials in products, specifically how to search for new materials and to explore the interactions between materials and shape. Central in this thesis is a novel design called Skin 2.0. Skin allows designers in the early stages, using their physical models, to experience richness of material visualization found in computer support of the latter design stages. Skin supports the imagination through iterative, highly interactive visualization cycles. It engages designers in trial and error processes, letting them explore new materials as well as the interactions between shape and materials. Skin itself was developed through a series of participative action research cycles. Prototypes of new tools and techniques were developed with practitioners, and evaluated in relevant, real world design situations. These cycles of research and design led to insights in how to support designer’s thinking process, ultimately leading to recommendations for “sketching” materials in products. http://studiolab.io.tudelft.nl/skin

Next to a great physical experience with the world famous blocks, there is a push to explore new ways of integrate a virtual play experience with LEGO building activity. Tangible Interaction for Playing (TiP) explores possibilities for a search initiated by LEGO Concept Lab. The project aims to find a new play experience able to integrate seamlessly: the traditional LEGO play with virtual elements. To assess the play value – the worth of a play experience in the opinion of the child – the designer approaches the assignment with a Human-Centred Design mind-set, sustaining close contact with children from start to end. At first, the designer builds an emphatic understanding of children’s play and context by means a Contextmapping done with parents as co-researchers. The research resulted on a set of Personal Cards, reporting children’s play, their family and their social contexts. In a second moment, the designer involved children to play with prototypes, in a sequence of short iterative cycles. By receiving children in regular basis, the designer could adjust key ingredients of the experience until the toy was considered to offer a coherent set of tools that facilitates a worthy play. At last, an experiential prototype simulating the complete experience was introduced to children in a final iteration. An evaluation on this last session led to considerations and recommendations regarding the play experience created for LEGO. RESULTS: AugmentedCity is a concept that brings augmented reality technology into the LEGO play. By using augmented realty, the designer was able to create a new layer of meaning and interactions without loosing the original qualities of the building blocks. By adjusting the scale and iconicity of the models, and by offering a viewer as tool for playing, the concept brings a small interactive world to the children’s hand. All ingredients together prove to support children to move seamlessly between physical and virtual play. Above all, the play felicitated by those ingredients offered a respectful interaction – respect towards children’s as the one in control of the play. AugmentedCity offers a play experience that kept spatial reasoning and all qualities present in the traditionally LEGO building system, while integrating it with a new virtual layer. The final experiential prototype confirmed the value of the experience that is now been taken further by other designers in LEGO Concept Lab.