Developing circular building components: Between ideal and feasible

Creating a circular economy within the built environment plays a crucial role in society’s pursuit to become more sustainable. A building consists of building components, such as a kitchen, façade and roof. By replacing building components with more circular ones during new construction, maintenance and renovation, we can gradually make...

Design guidelines for the monetary and financial system in the digital age

This thesis applies design science to the monetary and financial system as a whole. The application of this novel methodology offers new possibilities to examine this complex system. The contribution of this thesis is threefold. First, different theories on money, banking and systemic financial crises have been researched through an extensive...

Design Guidelines for Inclusive Speaker Verification Evaluation Datasets

Speaker verification (SV) provides billions of voice-enabled devices with access control, and ensures the security of voice-driven technologies. As a type of biometrics, it is necessary that SV is unbiased, with consistent and reliable performance across speakers irrespective of their demographic, social and economic attributes. Current SV...

Design guidelines towards humanization and Artificial Intelligence in the Intensive Care Unit

This report describes a graduation project for the MSc program Strategic Product Design. The client in this project is the Erasmus MC in the Netherlands and commissions this project incorporation with the Critical Alarms Lab (CAL) of the TU Delft. The Erasmus MC and CAL want to improve the experience of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) both for...

Design for refurbishment of child car seats – Towards circular safety critical products

This graduation project investigates the challenges of designing a safety critical consumer product suitable for the refurbishment loop of the circular economy through a case study on child car seats. Currently when child car seats are reused or resold on the second-hand market, their safety cannot be guaranteed as it is unknown whether the...

A perfect fit: creating supportive housing for the autistic

In contemporary society, a large part of the housing stock for people with autism focuses on living with house mates and in-house support (Berger et al., 2005). It seems, through several extensive questionnaires, that 65% of those individuals seek another housing situation, namely independent housing of some sort (Begeer et al., 2013). Design of...

Computationally efficient analysis & design of optimally compact gear pairs and assessment of gear compliance

Parameter study of velocity damped vibration energy harvesters

Existing research on vibration energy harvesting is often limited to two-parameter optimizations and single-frequency operation. In this paper a parameter study is performed on the four major design parameters of velocity-damped vibration energy harvesters in low frequency and wide bandwidth operation. The study is based on electromagnetic...

A product design framework for a circular economy

The paper provides a circular economy framework from a product design perspective with tools to aid product designers in applying circular product design in practice. Design research for circular economy has so far mainly been limited to referring to existing fields of research such as design for disassembly, remanufacturing and recycling. The...

Product Design for a Circular Economy: A case study towards a circular luminaire

In general the majority of the current economy is a linear economy based on a ‘take-make-dispose” model that relies on easily accessible resources and energy. This creates huge amounts of waste at end of life impacting nature and society. Furthermore resource scarcity is increasingly becoming an issue impacting price and availability of products...

Developing a mobile device for a Circular Economy

E-waste, price volatility of resources and the constant increase of the middle class world population expecting the same ‘high quality’ life standards have (amongst other) made some companies consider their options. In the reports of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, one aspect of the circular economy model aims at decoupling sales revenues from...

Building applications for mobile devices that will support business processes involving SAP

To support employees in carrying out their business processes, companies often use Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to support these processes, and simultaneously control these processes. Meanwhile mobile devices are more and more embedded in people’s life and way of working. Building applications for these mobile devices that will...

A sneaky kettle: Emotionally durable design explored in practice

Emotionally durable design is a genre of sustainable design that aims at reducing consumption and waste by enhancing the durability of the relationship established between users and products. Several design strategies and theories have been published on this topic; nevertheless, it is still underexposed in practice. This paper presents a case...

Creating caring hands through technology: An industrial designer's approach to medical teleconsultation

Doctor-patient teleconsultations have the potential to address the challenges of accessibility, quality and costs of healthcare. However, the diffusion of these systems into mainstream healthcare remains low. Taking a designer’s approach to developing teleconsultation systems is expected to have a positive effect on its acceptance. The aim of...

Reconnecting the public transport city: Towards a synergetic regeneration of the urban public transport system in the socio-spatial fabric of Vinex neighbourhoods

Project background This graduation project is performed to gain a grasp on the relationship between public transport system investments and urban development and regeneration. In what way do they influence each other, how can they benefit from each other and what conditions are necessary to create this sort synergetic relationship? A framework...

Persuasion for a Healthier Life: Persuasive Technology Design Guidelines from the Precious Project for Indian diabetics

Health behaviour change is a key issue in India and especially for reducing diabetes related risks. But the issue is confined neither to diabetes nor to India. After the proliferation of personal digital devices and widespread internet access, persuasion for behaviour change has taken new forms. In this paper we propose 8 design guidelines for...

Social quality in the conservation process of living heritage sites

The "UNESCO World Heritage Convention" was ratificated on November 16, 1972. Since then, both public and private sectors around the world have attached growing importance to the safeguarding and conservation of selected cultural and natural "objects", focusing on physical characteristics. World Heritage sites receive major publicity and as a...

Next generation equipment in the intensive care unit: Data collection for design guidelines