Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) brought rapid developments in generating synthetic images by mimicking structures in the training data. With the list of application of GANs growing drastically, it has lately become an exciting technology to explore for designers to communicate their ideas and arts through technology and create engaging experiences for humans. Nevertheless, translating human experiences to artificial intelligence and creating visually pleasant imagery is a challenging task due to complex semantics of human perception. To address this issue, we introduce an iterative training approach in which the generated images are curated by humans and the most pleasing ones are fed back into the network to retrain. Additionally, we do a factorial analysis to investigate how the aesthetic quality and the diversity are affected by the size of training data and training length. In experiments, we validate that this method can significantly improve the aesthetic quality of generated images regardless of the dataset size and training length, however the use of smaller datasets comes with a cost of reduction in the image diversity and novelty in the output images. The aesthetic bias towards certain contexts can also deteriorate the diversity and affect the model evaluations. On the other hand, no significant relationship has been found regarding the training length, however this could possibly be due to instabilities that happen during the model convergence progress.

Smartphones have revolutionized the way we live, giving us instant access to countless tools and apps (replacing dozens of single-function products), and this has made us more and more dependent on them. But there is another side, they are taking a heavy toll on our time and attention. Unpluq is a startup that aims to help people reclaim their time and attention from their smartphones and improve people's digital wellbeing. It was started by Jorn Rigter and Tim Smits (author of this graduation project). Unpluq’s first product is a physical key that users need to plug into their phone to access distracting apps. This physical distraction barrier changes using distracting apps from a mindless habit into a conscious choice. While the key acts as a successful hardware-based barrier, it is also a limiting factor in the growth of Unpluq, because of distribution and scaling. To overcome these problems this graduation project explores the development of a new software-only version of Unpluq as this opens up easy online distribution.

Smartphones have taken over control of our time and attention. It details how social media is hacking our primal brain because the business model behind the attention economy is driven to optimize for engagement, their advanced algorithms are designed to keep users scrolling. The reality is that the majority of the population has become addicted to their smartphone, with screen time reaching a 6-hour average each day in 2022. This leads to negative side effects like decreased mental wellbeing, attention span, self-reported life satisfaction, sleep quality, personal connection, productivity and more.

The project then shows the consumers' need for digital wellbeing and how this
need can be addressed through the use of tools that leverage behavioural change theories through interaction design. It explores how through the “rational override” behavioural theory it is possible to break the normal flow of smartphone usage, prompting the user to reflect and take conscious action.
Although 82% of people aspire to reduce their screen time, they’re struggling to do so. The built-in screen time features are too easy to circumvent, don’t change habits and miss a balance between giving up and having control.
From all the gathered quantitive and qualitative research, the graduation project establishes a list of principles of “interaction design for digital wellbeing”. The principles aim to guide interaction designers on designing for healthy digital behaviour by making users conscious, providing tools, setting intentions and finding the right balance between restoration and access to digital distractions. The design process is further guided by the insights from the research phase and follows an iterative process called the “Lean startup method” in which the designer goes through 7 Build /Measure / Learn cycles.

The main concept of the app is based on 6 distraction barriers (shaking your phone, tapping buttons and more), which have been carefully designed to find a balance between blocking access to digital distractions, while still allowing access with the right amount of conscious effort. The barriers work in combination with schedules, which let users select what apps are distracting at what time. To access the app within this time frame the user has to go through the “distraction barrier”. The distraction barrier acts as the rational override and helps the user to make a conscious choice: “Is this time well spent?”. The distraction barriers integrate the
principles of interaction design for digital wellbeing. It helps the user to make a conscious decision, balances restricting access and control and nudging towards healthier digital behaviour. The app also will include other features that are based on the principles like setting intentions, showing average screen time, time saved by unpluq, nudging notifications and suggested distracting apps.
In this graduation project, it has been established that digital wellbeing tools are necessary for overall human wellbeing as we increasingly spend our time in digital environments. Products like Unpluq can help people to improve their digital wellbeing and feel in control of their devices, making sure their time is well spent. This trend will continue to grow over the coming years, when the next major personal computer innovations like VR and AR become mainstream the necessity for digital well-being will only grow.

It would be hard to think of someone who isn’t benefiting from their social circles and social interactions within them. The many and varied social interactions we all experience are intrinsic to nurturing and maintaining our social connections, which are arguably one of the core capabilities to which we can attribute our dominance as a species. In parallel, we have our capacity to develop technologies. Which goes from the first tools and deliberately making of fire to antibiotics and the world wide web. All of which undoubtedly elevated our quality of life in general.Still, in spite of all these advancements, we seem to struggle with the pursuit of well-being - to achieve a balance between our capacities and the challenges we face. To be in a state of satisfaction while still driven and stimulated. And to flourish.One can say that today we are more connected to one another than ever before, with hundreds of people one touch away in our powerful smartphones and computers. Yet we seem to feel more isolated than ever (Coombs, 2020). Even more now with the challenges imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, literally isolating us even more.It shows that simply having the means to connect isn’t enough. It is necessary to understand what motivates us on a behavioural level, what makes us engage and maintain quality social interactions?This graduation project sets out to explore the experience of university students, in the Netherlands, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Aiming to be informed by the unique set of circumstances we face today, in the hope to design better digital solutions for our future. The project has the goal of assisting students in a remote study situation to be able to build and nourish their networks and personal relationships. The project’s approach is focused on qualitative data gathered in context mapping activities (Sanders & Stappers, 2012), combined with literature studies and fitting within a double diamond approach(TU Delft, 2019). In order to design for sustained well-being, the project follows the multi-stage framework for sustained wellbeing promoted by technology proposed by Wiese, Pohlmeyer & Hekkert,(2020).In order to understand the target group’s experiences, we have looked into their routines during the lockdown and collected their recollections of their previous university experiences. With the insights from the research, a problem statement was formed, leading to a design direction.The design direction was focused on stimulating and facilitating the engagement with positive activities related to the nurturing of personal relationships (Wiese, Pohlmeyer & Hekkert, 2020), exploring how to reinstate the drivers of behaviour necessary for the engagement with such activities in a virtual scenario.The ideation phase explored 10 different ways of virtual social interactions, which were later exposed to the target group for feedback and combined into one final concept: Atrium, a close-knit environment to feel connected and interact with your peers in digital university life.Atrium is a well-being informed digital platform. Designed to lower the friction in initiating social interactions between university peers. It creates an environment that conveys belonging and keeps you connected to the community, motivating students in their daily work and enabling moments for spontaneous and more natural online social interactions. Atrium means a communal space to be together and naturally connect, not only for tech-savvy and extroverted personalities but for all students.

The goal of this project was to find a way to improve digital well-being in family life through design for the startup Unpluq. In this thesis, the designer combined a design approach called Value Sensitive Design with the list of requirements methodology taught at Industrial Design Engineering. This resulted in a new methodology that allowed the designer to develop a concrete list of requirements and wishes for improving well-being through design. To establish this list of requirements, the design student performed a detailed literature review on positive psychology, behavioural economics and digital parenting literature. In addition to this, he interviewed both parents and children to empathise with their world views. Lastly, he performed a market analysis to understand how the context and available resources could affect Unpluq’s capacity to take up a role in this new market. Based on this research, the answer found is that improving digital well-being in the family life requires the design of a choice architecture that helps parents and children take more conscious control of their time and attention (both transactional values). Doing so should allow them to spend these transactional values on activities that align with things they intrinsically value. This choice architecture should help rearrange actors, artefacts, and stimuli within the family home environment so that time is less easily spent without intentional consent. Based on this list of requirements, the design student initiated a design process to translate these insights into a physical design concept that Unpluq could bring to the market to help families rearrange this choice architecture. This design process was executed by iteratively evaluating design concepts with both the client, potential end-users, experts, and professionals from different psychology and pedagogics fields. In the end, the designer delivered a concept that stimulates reflective thinking about what users find intrinsically valuable and provides tips, tools and challenges that push them to try and change habits. This is done by focusing on conversations that help raise awareness of the critical issues and stimulating the iterative goal setting that the family should engage in to start solving these issues for themselves. The way that time can and should be allocated for intrinsically valued activities was so unique for each individual and family that it is hard to find one solution to help everyone. Therefore, the core insight of this project for Unpluq is that if they would be interested in entering this market, their focus should be on helping families reimagine the way they use their environments within their own family homes. This should be done both individually and together through reflection and iteration and supported in that journey by scientific and expert information.

This project presents the study of flow (perfect focus) as a possible solution to the modern decrease in attention span, especially in young professionals. Two separate tests were conducted to study the possibility of measuring productivity as a correlation of focus levels. These led to the creation of a software capable of tracking work efficiency in front of the computer, nevertheless, it lacked an interface or interaction with the user. To solve this, an app was created, FlowTrain, which learns from the user’s productivity patterns and advises on the ideal moments to work on tasks to maximize flow output. The result is integrated into the window UI and is focused around the creation of a conditioning ritual to reduce phone use and the limitation of distractors during working moments.

People are actively looking to pursue happiness by spending their precious time on meaningful experiences, which are often sought for in media entertainment as it is people’s most engaged in leisure activity today. However, current services fail to support them or even counter them, with their manipulative media-platforms in favor of their goals often at the cost of people’s goals. This creates a world of regret instead of happiness. The student of this graduation project claims that media entertainment designers should feel responsible to design services that respect and allow people to pursue their goals in finding happiness through it. This project can be considered an example, or even proof that there is indeed a manner to realize that and that, as company, it is crucial to do so as people are starting to reject services that are threatening their happiness.

APPROACH
This graduation project first investigated what happiness consisted of, and how media entertainment could contribute to that. The conclusion was that people need to engage in mindful, intentional, intrinsically motivated media-experiences which well-balances short-term pleasure (Hedonia) with long-term happiness (Eudaimonia). Then, current platforms were analysed to understand why they exist and why they are currently designed the way they are and how this affects well- being. The conclusion was that current streaming-platforms are being created to maximize media-consumption which resulted in an over-focus on hedonia at the cost of eudaimonia and therefore people’s long-term happiness. As ViP focuses on re-framing and reinvention by creating future opportunities, instead of solving the present-day problems, a future context of 2020 had been outlined through an extensive analysis using academic literature, trend reports- and sites and interviews. The result was three meta-factors that described the world of 2020 as “embracing the mindful pursuit of meaningfulness’.

SOLUTION
ViP states that as a designer, you should take a position in this future vision. The goal of this project is to design a new streaming-platform that improves people’s well- being through media-entertainment, which resulted in the following statement:
I want to empower people to experience media-entertainment meaningfully, by guiding them in articulating their intentions through trusted others.

DESIGN
The new concept considers media-entertaiment as meaningfull experience packages and facilites people in finding these packages through the suggestions of trusted others, such as people close to the user (like family and friends) but also famous people/accounts (like inspirational influencers or design blogs).
Plus it empowers people to experience these entertainment-packages meaningfully by increasing their mindfulness through 6 steps.
The concept contributes to well-being by focussing on improving both the hedonic and the eudaimonic experience by increasing people’s autonomy, competence and relatedness, focussing on personal growth, achieving goals, finding meaning in life and improving people’s vitalty by better self-regulating their media-behavior.