This project focuses on translating a historical pop-up book into a meaningful virtual experience. The project is in collaboration with the National Library (KB) of the Netherlands, which has a special collection of historical pop-up books. The KB will be moving their collections to an external location, making the books inaccessible. These books are meant to be interacted with; however, this interaction also makes them fragile and rare. Virtual reality offers a solution to this dilemma as it can be used to preserve the original heritage while also making it accessible in an innovative way. The use of VR fits within a wider development of new technologies being implemented in museums and cultural heritage institutions. This project creates a VR experience with a pop-up book called: Tip & Top boven de wolken, created in 1964. The project specifically focuses on two different aspects of the heritage: the materiality and the narrative. It researches how these aspects influence the experience in both physical and virtual pop-up books. It also aims to enhance the aspects using the affordances and interactions possible in VR, with the ultimate goal to integrate the aspects into a coherent experience. The project starts with a literature review, which selects relevant frameworks for characterizing the materiality and measuring the narrative engagement. It is supported with additional desktop research looking into existing applications of VR/AR for (children’s) books. Two observation studies were conducted focusing on the materiality and the narrative. The first study compares the materiality of physical pop-up books with that of virtual pop-up books. The second study is focused on the narrative engagement and interpretation of the story of the case study book. These insights form the input for the ideation and conceptualization phases. A creative session was hosted to generate ideas for new interactions with the virtual book that integrate materiality and narrative. The interactions and general flow of the virtual book were tested using different storyboards, ranging in fidelity from paper to interactive digital storyboards. A new approach to materiality in VR was created to combine the materiality of the artifact with that of the narrative. The insights of the different concepting rounds were incorporated into a final prototype. The final concept integrated the materiality and the narrative through special interactions called material touchpoints. The final concept was compared to the original book and the interactive storyboards and it met all the design goals.

Today, thanks to digitization, publications are no longer fixed, but dynamic and fluid. The convenience of carrying, the diversity of interaction and the convenience of resource acquisition provided by e-reading make e-reading more and more popular. However, there is still a lot of room for exploration in this field based on the more reading experience brought to readers by electronic screens, and it is also the direction that more laboratories and companies want to develop. There are many interactions and feedback that cannot be achieved in physical reading, such as how to make readers immerse themselves in the scene and truly feel the objects in the book; the reader establishes an emotional connection with the objects described in the book through touch and generates emotional resonance; or through touch senses attract readers' attention, enhance their reading concentration, etc. And these can be achieved through e-reading. Furthermore, in the process of reading, because the reading medium is mostly limited by paper books, most people memorize the contents of a book by vision, except for some auxiliary tools, such as bookmarks or dog-earing pages. But with the development of e-reading, readers can have more forms of interaction with e-books, not limited to visuals; at the same time, e-books can also provide more feedback modes. So, will this multi-sensory reading mode provide new opportunities for people's long-term memory of reading content? This graduate project explores how to improve the readers' e-reading experience and the long-term memory of the content through haptic technology. I gained more relevant information through literature reviews on topics such as haptic exploration and reading comparisons of print and e-books, as well as research with target users. The target group was identified as 20-30 year olds who are familiar with and own electronic reading devices. In order to achieve the design goal, an interaction vision with three qualities of immersed, focused and playful is proposed. Based on the insights gleaned from the research phase, I designed 5 initial prototypes and tested them with 11 participants. After this, test results are collected and analyzed for a second iteration, resulting in an integrated prototype. Then, the test was conducted again with 3 participants, and the test results were collected and analyzed, resulting in a third prototype. Finally, I tested the third prototype again with 6 testers and finally got the final design. A total of three test evaluations and prototype iterations are used to continuously refine the design prototype to improve its usability and functionality. The final design of this project is a mobile-based e-reading application. It can transmit the emotional changes of characters in the story through vibration, thus bringing users a more immersive, focused and playful reading experience.

DESIGN OPPORTUNITY The TU Delft student theses repository has not been updated since it switched to digital PDF reports in 2007. Currently, entries only contain a title, author and contributors, programme, date, abstract, and the PDF to download. While the search engine is fine if you know the author's name or the title of the thesis you're looking for, users expressed that it's difficult to use the repository to find inspiration for your own graduation project, see what reports are good or not, or to find out what supervisors look for in a project, or what projects they usually take on. After uploading, the entry looks boring, and doesn't grip the reader's attention. Furthermore, the entries are not very visible internally, or externally (like on google scholar) . THE GOAL My goal was to redesign the repository to: ● Allow students to upload (interactive) multimedia to their repository pages. ● programmatically add multimedia to already uploaded repository pages. ● Redesign the user interface with a user centered design approach. THE SOLUTION The solution My new design features: ● 'Thumbnail' images, graphical abstracts, posters, embedded videos, and interactive embeds (such as 3D model viewers), which show what the thesis is about. ● One or two sentence 'pitches' under titles that allow users to quickly assess interest. ● Views, bookmark, and download metrics that show how popular a thesis is; Entry awards; featured theses; and supervisor highlights make it easier for users to find examples of good projects. ● Supervisor profiles that show all their supervised theses, some information on what they do, and if they might be available for supervising your project. ● Publishing theses will no longer be mandatory, so people who aren't proud of their mediocre thesis will show up less. ● Related theses/supervisors/keywords in a sidebar can help a user find more of what they're interested in.

The present research delves into the social aspects of food, commensality, and food rituals. It investigates the interplay between embodied gestures, artifacts, and language in shaping food cultures. To do this, the study delves into the acculturation of dietary habits within two multicultural communities in the Netherlands, mixed households of Turkish-Dutch and Dutch-Surinamese individuals. Recent years have seen a shift in food studies towards recognizing food as a cultural practice embedded in embodied experiences, social interactions, and language usage. This exploration extends to food rituals, reflecting and reproducing social norms and values, while language in the culinary world serves as a dynamic space for intercultural communication and identity negotiation. The complexity of multicultural contexts poses a challenge for designers aiming to develop inclusive solutions that resonate with diverse cultural perspectives. Context mapping techniques have emerged to address this, offering designers insights into users' contexts, including their cultural and linguistic dimensions. However, ethical considerations and the need for a robust framework for ritual observations demand reliable tools. To this end, the Ritualia toolkit was developed. It provides a systematic approach to observing and analyzing rituals, guiding designers in understanding the material world with artifacts, habitual actions and gestures, roles played by diners, and the language they use in food contexts. This toolkit equips designers and practitioners with the means to navigate the intricacies of diverse cultural settings, fostering culturally sensitive design solutions. By relying on solid anthropological and cultural frameworks, these toolkit contributes to bridging the disciplines of interest for gaining a deeper understanding of cultural practices and values. Applying an interdisciplinary approach allows designers to engage with diverse cultural contexts, crafting concepts contextually tailored. As food studies progress, this study contributes to a deeper comprehension of the complex interplay among food, culture, and societal dynamics in the modern world, hoping to spark new research and design initiatives that dive deeper into this aspect of human existence.

Art is the universal language of humanity. Art viewing not only evokes aesthetic pleasure but also inspires people to create their own art. In this digital age, more and more museums democratize their art by making their digital collections freely available online. However, these online sources are mainly targeted at researchers and visit planners who have specific search goals in mind. For inspiration-seekers who usually start with a vague idea, the current way of access to museum digital collections–searching through metadata–limits their exploration. This graduation project explored how to help novice artists seek inspiration in museum online collections. Through literature review on the topics of inspiration and creativity and interviews with creators, an understanding of the context was gained. According to the user study, museum digital collections are more valued by beginner artists. The design goal and target group were narrowed down for the following ideation phase. Three interaction qualities, guiding, resonating and encouraging were used as guidance through the exploration. Based on the insights gathered from the context exploration, four rapid prototypes were developed and tested with seven participants to define the final design direction. In addition, the interface of the chosen prototype was redesigned to enhance its usability. The final concept, ArtMind, is an online tool that allows users to make textual associations to diverge their ideas while also recommending them similar artworks to converge ideas. The final design consists of three core functions: associating search, recommending artworks with similar visual characteristics and making personal collections. Finally, ​​user testing allowed me to evaluate whether my design solution achieves the design goal. Participants claimed that ArtMind offers a unique inspirational path. By broadening their thinking pathways, users were able to generate more original ideas.