Design mobile support for cross-cultural travelers

This project looked into the ways applying mobile supports in cross-cultural travel, as well as how travelers use mobile supports to improve their travel experience. It was realized in the research that travelers could form various travel cultures based on their travel behaviors and values. Thus in the project, a research structure, integrating...

Organisational blueprints for growth in service firms

Start-ups and Smaller and Medium sized Enterprises are vital for national economies. The vast majority of these enterprises can be found in services industries. One of the parameters to measure performance of a company is growth. Only a very small percentage of these enterprises find ways to sustainable growth. Little is known on models for...

From BoP to ToP and vice versa daily practices in settings with limited resources to inspire designers

This paper reviews the methods and practices that reflect subconscious behaviours of people in daily lives. Cases, studied for this paper, show how practices of people living in poor settings, who are members of the base of the economic pyramid, contribute to designers, belonging to the top of the economic pyramid, in designing better products...

Dunea: From moderation to facilitation

Dunea as tap-water provider sits in a complex context. Their monopoly market position offers little drive for innovation which has led to a reactive rather than pro-active culture. With the direct context being influenced by major developments, from demographic to agriculture and climate, Dunea has expressed interest to become more agile and...

The Impact of Cultural Differences in Design Thinking Education

Design thinking is a specific method to develop innovative solutions to wicked problems in multidisciplinary teams. The fact that people with different disciplinary and often also cultural backgrounds work together, makes it quite a challenge to compensate for deficits in common understanding of terminologies or mind-sets. Furthermore, team...

The subculture of electronic dance music: Developing a strategy for ZeeZout: from underground to event brand

ZeeZout is a young Dutch company focused at events in the (underground) house music. A strong believe in music as common ground between people leads ZeeZout as a growing brand in the Dutch electronic music scene. With different events throughout the Netherlands, ZeeZout is striving to build a strong brand in house music, both through earning the...

The Ideal Electric Bicycle for Commuters

This thesis represents a graduation project that was done for the early stage startup: Spaac. The alternative title is: A Design Intervention to Stimulate E-Bike Acceptance. A bicycle was designed to appeal to young commuters that currently do not ride e-bikes because of the social stigma. The Cultural Strategy of Douglas Holt was used to come...

Reconstructing the online recipe, the shift from sharing instructions to sharing food experiences

This report entitled “Reconstructing the online recipe, the shift from sharing instructions to sharing the food experience” describes the development of a new concept for IceMobile. IceMobile currently operates in the context of online communities, where people can find, share and organize user-generated recipes. The concept, a tablet...

Care you more: Design for interactions between the Dutch cabin crew and the Chinese passengers

The assignment of this project is to improve the in-flight experience of Chinese passengers and cabin crews and meanwhile enhance their relationship by focusing on their interactions. By investigating the current interactions, and experimenting the new interactions, the gap between the crew service and passenger’s needs were identified for...

Designers coping with culture in an educational setting

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study about how design students cope with culture in the i-do (international design opportunity) series of international design workshops in Hong Kong. We wanted to learn three things. (1) To what extent do the design students from different nations share common cultural values? (2) what...

Perceived modernity and product preferences: What matters? Culture or (and) market development

This research looks into the evaluation of product aesthetics in different cultural contexts and it aims to disentangle the prominent influential factor on products’ aesthetic appraisal. The product meaning: modernity is used to evaluate the relationship between consumers’ perception of product appearance and the aesthetic appraisal. For the...

Designing for Alternative (Sustainable) Bathing Practices

Today, showering is the most common bathing practice in Europe. It has the highest water consumption in a household (around 100 litres, for 8min shower). Unlike technological developments to improve eco-efficiency of existing products, this project introduces alternative ways (alternative to showering) of bathing that are less resource intensive...

Fit for washing; Human factors and ergonomic evaluations of washing machines

People do the laundry all over the world. About 500 million washing machines are in use at the moment. To reduce the heavy workload, washing machines were invented about 100 years ago. 50 years of innovations led to a reduction in water, energy and detergent consumption and the interface became easier to use. However, the overall usage of the...