Learning from Outstanding Designers: Exploring the Interplay of Design Expertise, Sketching, and Prototyping

Wave-induced vibrations of flood gates: modelling, experimentation and design

Flood gates form an essential part of many flood defence systems in coastal areas. During storm events, these gates are subjected to extreme loads from various sources. This dissertation addresses the dynamic behaviour of flood gates induced by wave impacts. A semi-analytical fluid-structure interaction model is developed to predict vertical...

Design for Recycling of Electronic Products: How to bridge the gap between design methods and recycling practices

The topic of this thesis is design for recycling (DfR) of electronic products. More than ever before, electronic products are intruding into our everyday life, both in the household and in industry, resulting in increasing numbers of electronic products ending up in waste streams (also known as electronic waste, or e-waste). Electronic products...

Entrepreneurship eduction through design: Exploring different design perspectives to understand and educate the business proposition development process in new high-tech ventures

This thesis takes the perspective that ‘a design approach’ might help to better understand and educate the business proposition development in new high-tech ventures. This has been observed at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology, where design students (without an entrepreneurial education) start...

Escaping the emotional blur: Design tools for facilitating positive emotional granularity

In human-product interactions, pleasure has many different shades. We can, for example, be proud of using an eco-friendly detergent, be all aflutter in anticipation of a planned trip when looking at a calendar application or experience a feeling of cathartic relief when playing a mobile phone game. Although these experiences are all pleasurable,...

Incorporating sensemaking perspective in design: Supporting physicians during the contouring tasks in radiotherapy

Radiotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that uses high energy radiation to shrink tumors by destroying cancer cells. It is estimated that 52 per cent of cancer patients can potentially benefit from this type of treatment (Delaney et al. 2005). Planning radiotherapy treatment is a complicated multi-disciplinary process (Aselmaa et al. 2013b)....

The beauty of Unity-in-Variety: Studies on the multisensory aesthetic appreciation of product designs

This thesis embarks from the idea that aesthetic appreciation of product designs is determined by simultaneously perceiving the two partially opposing dimensions of unity and variety. People actively avoid boredom by searching for variety because it challenges the senses and offers the potential of learning new information. Hence, people browse...

Implications of Social Practice Theory for Sustainable Design

Sustainable design faces challenges at a scale and level of complexity that are ill at ease with design’s mainstream focus on products and users. Recently, social practice theory has been suggested as a promising theoretical framework to inform new ways of designing. In social practice theory, practices – socially shared entities such as...

Design of Photocatalytic Reactors

Photocatalysis is a photochemical reaction induced by photon–absorption of a solid material, a "photocatalyst", that remains unchanged during the reaction. Photocatalysis has a wide variety of applications, e.g., degrading contaminants in aqueous solutions and in air, oxidizing liquid hydrocarbons, and reducing carbon dioxide into valuable...