Product lifetime extension through design: Encouraging consumers to repair electronic products in a circular economy

Our production and consumption patterns of electronic products exceed the limits of what one planet can handle. Prolonging product lifetimes decreases the value losses caused by the destruction of existing products and lowers the amount of e-waste. Repair is an impactful strategy to tackle the issues associated with the production and...

Fault Diagnosis in Household Appliances: A Design Perspective

Today’s industrialized societies face the challenge of integrating economic activity with sustainable consumption. Prosperity has come hand in hand with environmental damage. Product lifetimes are decreasing and there is a rising demand for high-tech products for which no effective recycling is in place. Hence, the value from products is lost to...

Design for Well-Being: An Approach for Understanding Users' Lives in Design for Development

Many of the Design for Development outcomes which are unsuited to the users and their environment are based on poorly defined needs and preferences. Product designers are trained to take the user perspective into account, but they are not specifically trained to conduct ethnographic research. Thereby, they have limited time and resources to...

Design -|+ Negative emotions for positive experiences

Experience-driven design considers all aspects of a product – its appearance, cultural meaning, functionality, interaction, usability, technology, and indirect consequences of use – with the aim to optimize and orchestrate all these aspects and create the best possible user experience. Since the late 1990s, designers and design researchers have...

Nature-Inspired Design: Strategies for Sustainable Product Development

Product designers can apply different strategies, methods, and tools for sustainable product development. Nature-Inspired Design Strategies (NIDS) offer designers a distinct class of strategies that use ‘nature’ as a guiding source of knowledge and inspiration for addressing sustainability. Biomimicry and Cradle to Cradle, two Nature-Inspired...

Crossing Cultural Chasms: Towards a culture-conscious approach to design

This thesis concerns specifically the discipline of product design, and the main question is how can designers be supported in understanding the culture of their intended users. The reason for this study is that designers are experiencing difficulties and uncertainties with regard to their intended users, as these users live in cultures with...

Metaphors we design by: The use of metaphors in product design

Imagine a coffee maker that subtly references the serving gesture of a butler or a car that explicitly mimics the sleek and streamlined form of a jet plane. Such metaphors are frequently used by designers as a means to render the values and meanings they want to assign to a product into a physical form. By their nature, metaphors build...

Role-based support for intensive care nursing: A designer's perspective

Design goals and design directions are formulated for the (digital) support of non-technical nursing tasks and skills in the intensive care unit (ICU), such as organizing work, evaluating care, coping with stress and dealing with poor team dynamics. A conceptual framework for ICU nursing was developed that provides product developers with a...

Managing Product Usability: How companies deal with usability in the development of electronic consumer products

Problem statement: Even though there is a large amount of methods for user-centred design, the usability of electronic consumer products (e.g., portable music players, washing machines and mobile phones) is under pressure. Usability is the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness,...

Testing virtual use with scenarios

To enhance the effectiveness of engineering simulations in product development, this thesis presents a new approach that enables designers to include human responses and reactions to artefact behaviour in their investigations. It does so without requiring deployment of real human subjects or investing in interactive virtual environments. The new...

Sensory incongruity and surprise in product design

People continuously experience the world and the objects in it through all their senses. Product designers can influence the way people experience products by paying attention to the multiple sensory aspects of product design. Designing sensory experiences can be aimed at communicating a consistent message to all sensory channels, making this...

Product sounds: Fundamentals and application

Products are ubiquitous, so are the sounds emitted by products. Product sounds influence our reasoning, emotional state, purchase decisions, preference, and expectations regarding the product and the product's performance. Thus, auditory experience elicited by product sounds may not be just about the act of hearing or a sensory response to an...

Selecting materials in product design

This thesis exists of several studies and design steps that resulted in a new material selection technique for user-centred design, which is supported by tools. The tools use examples of materials in products and stimulate the discussions about the user-interaction aspects of those materials desired in a new product. The sensorial properties of...

For Inspiration Only; Designer interaction with informal collections of visual material

Designers surround themselves with visual material as a source of inspiration. The images are used in collages and moodboards to define and communicate the direction of a design project at an early stage of the design process. This thesis describes how designers interact with their collections of visual material and how new tools can support...

Designing with precedents

Every year designers are challenged to generate new and unique product forms. Often, the design and form of previous products constitutes a basis for the generation of new ones. What role then do existing products play in the generation and development of new product forms? How can this role be influenced by means of new design techniques? And...