Nurture in Nature: Contributing to childhood development in Bressoux & Droixhe by strengthening nature connectivity

'The Scarred City', the theme of the Urban Architecture graduation studio in 2022/2023. This location-based studio started with Droixhe/Bressoux, a troublesome and difficult area in Liège (Belgium), as the overarching project site. Starting with fieldwork and participatory research into the hidden social structures of Bressoux and Droixhe and...

A shin guard to boost my confidence and protect your legs: Positive design for child amputees’ sports performance

Children living with lower limb differences can utilize prostheses for mobility and conformity. However, children’s prostheses is a small market where development happens slowly, with a very small selection of products.<br/>Products in the children’s prosthetics market prioritize providing mobility and tackling mechanical challenges, but amputee...

Haptic Lullaby: Research & design of a vibrating smart mattress that helps young children sleep

Young children often have problems sleeping. Some are afraid of the dark. Or wake up multiple times during the night. Another just does not want to go to bed or lays awake for a long time. Whatever the reason, a lack of sleep makes the children tired during the day. For parents, their child's well-being is important, so they want them to sleep...

Improving patient wellbeing in the Wilhelmina Children’s hospital through a design concept for the activity room

Yearly, roughly 350.000 child hospitalizations take place in the Netherlands and 27% of Dutch children had a chronic disease in 2019, varying from frequently occurring diagnoses like asthma to rare and progressive diseases. However, the life expectancy for children who suffer from a chronic illness continues to increase considerably. This...

Improving parent-child communication: creating a relaxed conversation atmosphere during the COVID-19 quarantine period

With the influence of COVID-19, people all over the world are facing significant challenges. Families with school-aged children face difficulties in helping the children transition from traditional school to online education while bearing various stress due to the epidemic quarantine measures. The situation leads to an intense parent-child...

Let's walk! Design the gait test station for children

This project aims at designing a gait test station for children. The gait test station tests children’s walking in Child Brain Lab at Sophia Children’s hospital. The children in this project are at the age of 4-10 with different capacities.<br/>There are two scopes in this project, the service scope of the gait test and the experience scope of...

Bo: An intelligent network agent to promote physical activity in children with Congenital Heart Defects

There are various organisations such as the European Society of Cardiology (2012) and American Heart Association (2013), which describe why physical activity is essential for the development in youth. Unfortunately, children who have a Congenital Heart Defect (CHD), may suffer from a lack of opportunity to perform physical activity, decreasing...

X-eo: Researching & Designing for Rebellious play

This reports the graduation project aimed to investigate the occurrence of rebellious play through the X-eo prototype. Rebellious behaviour is often referred to as going against the norm and derives its value from breaking rules. Previous academic research (Gielen &amp; Van Leeuwen, 2013), on the subject, has provided suggestions and techniques...

Design of a Sustainable Bamboo Toy for Preschool Children

This project is performed for Tre Vang Company, a small scale bamboo factory in Vietnam, with the great love for the nature by producing bamboo products and creating employment with production of fair trade for the Western market. The market of bamboo products in Western market is gradually growing due to the increasing awareness of...

Harnessing Children's Creativity in Contextmapping Activities

Recently developed co-design methods ask for users’ creative outcomes all through the design process. Designers are familiar with the creative process but users are not. The heuristic tasks given to users should reveal their creativity and harness it for high-quality outcomes. Contextmapping is a new co-design method following the same need as...