Human-Window Interaction in open-plan offices: Guiding occupants to improve window operation through window feedback systems

Occupants are often unaware of window opening strategies that can enhance their well-being and reduce energy consumption. Window feedback systems that indicate when to manually operate a window have become a strategy for enhancing the indoor climate, occupant’s satisfaction and energy efficiency. These systems are recognized for providing the...

Robots for a Cleaner Amsterdam: Roadmapping Waste Relationships for the Next Decade

As current cleaning targets are not achieved, Amsterdam requested to explore the potential for robots to contribute to a cleaner city. This thesis focused on exploring how a robot could contribute. A contextual analysis, reviewing literature and municipal documents, showed an increasing need for improved waste management efficiency in response...

The Art of Behaviour: nudging towards healthy habits

This research aims to encourage healthy behaviour within the built environment using a technique called nudging. Mostly used outside of the field of architecture, nudging aims to improve health by presenting options in such a way people a more likely to choose one option (a healthier alternative), without losing any freedom of choice. <br/><br/...

Role of household climate change adaptation in reducing coastal flood risk: The case of Shanghai

Climate change intensifies the frequency and severity of floods - the most devastating and costly climate-induced hazard. Government adaptations such as dikes or beach nourishments are important, yet insufficient in the face of worsening hazards. They reduce the hazard probability, but the local actions at the household level determine the...

My Coping Toolkit: Reframing the way we deal with stress

We all want to keep balance in our lives, however, we don’t live statically, changes in our daily environments are inevitable and the need to know how to restore balance when faced with external stimuli is a lifetime effort. <br/><br/>The long-term effects of stress, both physical and psychological, are of increasing concern with some even...

Designing Unique Emotions for Autonomous Delivery Robots

Robotic delivery services can provide contactless delivery, a highly sought-after service under mandates of social distancing since the coronavirus pandemic has arisen. With the rise of autonomous delivery robots, humans' and robots' collaborative existence has become a crucial topic to be discussed. This graduation project aimed to explore the...

Making a Delivery Robot Streetwise Using Expressive Movement

Last-mile delivery robots intended to operate on the sidewalk still require supervision because they are only semi-autonomous. If left to their own devices, they tend to cause undesired interactions. Our project proposes a design philosophy that can reduce the amount and severity of these interactions, improving the overall acceptance of...

A personalized approach for communicating found anomalies in Netflow data to end-users

In this research, we use different supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques to detect anomalies in NetFlow data. We aim to create a system for home or small-business use where the user is in control. We use WEKA for the machine learning models and feature selection. The UGR’16 dataset is used to train and test the models. We...

Activating household waste separation behaviour in high-rise Rotterdam: Capitalising on the moment of moving for stimulating behavioural change

Currently, the City of Rotterdam is far from achieving their ambitious 2020 goal of a 40% household waste separation rate. In 2017, their separation rate was only 28,4%. Household waste separation is important to enable the recycling of resources. For high-rise buildings, the challenge is the biggest: high-rise buildings produce an average of...

Macro-scale performance of a mega-feeder nourishment: Describing and predicting the long-term feeding performance

A mega-feeder nourishment is a concentrated nourishment that disperses over time due to wind, waves, and tide, and as a result ‘feeds’ its adjacent coasts. During the design phase of a nourishment, performance indicators can enable an objective comparison of a mega-feeder nourishment to alternative nourishment strategies, In the case of an...

Inducing change in a conservative industry: The effects of simulation gaming on behavioural change in the construction sector

Because in the past, assignments of infrastructure projects became less specific and increasingly complex over time, construction companies had to start joining forces and working together to be able to deliver these projects. This asked for a change in behaviour of the employees on these projects. According to literature, in other industries,...

Rational Override; influencing behaviour beyond nudging: A service design approach towards creating behavioural interventions

Service organizations are struggling to understand and change behaviour since it is complex, dynamic, multidimensional and very often not considered to be rational. Human behaviour is a key component in services, as the interaction between a user and touchpoints determines the overall performance and value. Increasingly, service organizations...

Data Analytics in Web-based Education in the Higher-education Classroom

Attention span of students in a classroom is very short. To overcome this, different active learning methodologies have been used in the past. Active learning keeps the students busy and engaged throughout the lecture. It breaks the lecture into certain time intervals by intermixing breaks, demonstrations and questions after each interval. For...

Root Cause Analysis of Price Behaviour of Copper and Copper Market Volatility

A decade of extremely high and volatile copper prices has disturbed industries and raised the need for an extensive understanding of current predictors by means of indicators, signals, events and developments concerning the copper market. The goal of this research is to find a suitable method to prioritise events (including developments) on...

Views to deal with the challenges of implementing Best Value: A study to provide guidelines to optimize the client - contractor relationship in the clarification and execution phase

In order to realise more focus on quality in tenders the construction industry must move away from the low-bid arena characterised by specifications, qualifications, standards and management and inspection by the client. New procedures must be adopted to react on the need for harmonized procurement policies for public contracting authorities,...