Anno 2021, designers engage with questions of increasing complexity and impact. Designers are involved in creating services and systems that reach beyond an individual user, ultimately reshaping society. This realisation motivates the question of how designers should deal with the accompanying responsibility. The domain of Design for Values (van den Hoven et al., 2015) encourages conscious innovation with the call for a deliberate design for values and advocates a thoughtful stance towards the creation of artefacts. As social design is concerned with societal well-being and commitment to design for the common good (Tromp, Hekkert, 2017), it is regarded as a specificity of Design for Values. This thesis opens up the conversation of impact in social design practices by researching how designing for values is validated within social design projects. Although the mission for conscious design is vital, frameworks to assess the adequate operationalisation of values are lacking, and impact methodology in the field of social design is fairly under developed. Hence, measures to guarantee value manifestation and safeguard engagement with claims made are missing. For this reason, both domains of Design for Values and social design will be enhanced by a framework that supports assessing the design for value, as a result enabling validation of value realisation within design projects. The Value Validation Framework introduced in this thesis presents the structure of reasoning towards a valid value claim. It is argued that to make a valid claim, designers must specify their value claim in terms of effects on behaviour, substantiate a claim with proper evidence and provide justification for these specifications. This ensures construct validity for the claim being made and above all, that designers discern what they are factually achieving. As a result, the framework administers a critical stance towards the impact that can be ascribed to projects. First, the Value Validation Framework was constructed out of theoretical models enriched with qualitative data from an explorative study among professionals. This framework enabled to assess social design projects and was used in the second part of this thesis, the case study research. In this study, five social design projects are assessed concerning the validity of their claim to realise a particular value with their design. The study provided an increased understanding of how designers structure their design projects and this information was used in the third part of this thesis. In which the analysis was used to reflect on ways to make valid value claims. Social designers involved in the case study research endorse the unique perspective that the Value Validation Framework provides and emphasise that the conducted analysis has provided a meaningful assessment of their social design projects. A commitment to value claim validation provides an opportunity for social designers to enhance their considerations of effect and focus on the substantial impact they accomplish. As a result, contributing to a renewed perspective on how they can enhance their design project and fundamentally commit to a better world.

For the migrants who left the place they were anchored to, the meaning of resettling is much more than the physical transition from one place to another. The journey of migration is also a process of transformation, during which people went through the self-deconstruction and reshape on many levels. For those who went across borders to the Netherlands in their early twenties to study or work, building a new life also means making an adjustment to a new reality where new information, values, cultural norms and social relations flooded in. This process may be filled with excitement and freshness for people who are able to respond positively to the adjustments, while the majority of people have a mixed experience of challenging, overwhelming, stressful or even traumatising situations. In the case of young Chinese migrants in the Netherlands, because of the unique cultural identity brought by history and the Chinese social system, their emotional struggles in the western world are relatively particular and obscure. This graduation project focused on developing a new vision towards migration for client NPC(NextPort Chine) and a design based on this vision. This is formulated in the assignment: Designing a product(or service system) based on research outcomes of the emotional needs of Chinese migrants who are deciding to make or have already made a decision to stay in the Netherlands, by 2025. ViP(Vision in Product Design) method was applied to build a future CHN-NL migration context and define the interaction method in this project. This future context was shaped by two overall determining driving forces and seven sub driving forces. Twelve cases in which people struggle personally or socially during the migration journey were finally revealed. After evaluating if the twelve cases were meaningful, in line with company scope, and potential to be developed into a functional product, two of the cases were finally chosen to be targeted design goal: Goal A: To help people restore their inner balance again after the impact of the migration process when people’s inner reality is confronted which can cause a psychological imbalance. Goal B: To help people make peace with loneliness. After defining the ways of accomplishing the two design goals, two design solutions were then proposed to realise each of the design goals. Generated from Goal A, a mental care mini-program embedded in WeChat Application was designed to help with emotional struggles among young Chinese migrants to the Netherlands. Both peer support and access to professional mental therapy were provided to reduce the psychological imbalance. Generated from Goal B, a toolkit including deconstruction of the feeling of loneliness and a zine of loneliness objects was designed to help people cope with the emotions and rebuild self-esteem. Apart from evaluating the final outcome, suggestions for further design improvements and recommendations for future implementation were given in the last chapter.

Artificial illumination has had profound and far-reaching impacts on the development, use, and perceptions of urban nights, and has brought with it many benefits. However, in recent years its adverse costs and effects – commonly referred to as light pollution – have emerged as a topic of concern. Nighttime lighting uses enormous amounts of energy, costs billions of dollars annually, can be detrimental to the health of humans and ecosystems, and cuts off access to a starry night sky. Addressing these impacts, and more fundamentally understanding the underlying values shaping contemporary discourse, is a complex and pressing challenge with moral, aesthetic, political, and technical dimensions. This dissertation takes up this challenge by offering a critical examination of the historical roots and normative presuppositions shaping the concept of light pollution. This critique leads to the proposal of an alternative normative framework: instead of focusing on reducing lighting, it argues for fostering darkness in urban nightscapes. A designing for darkness approach is developed on two interrelated levels. The first is conceptual, exploring the relationship between darkness, illumination, and environmental values. The second is practical, proposing first steps towards realizing darker nights via the responsible design of new and emerging technologies, namely LEDs and autonomous vehicles. Taken together, the chapters of this dissertation weave together a critical investigation and constructive contribution to a pressing urban challenge for the 21st century.@en