This executive summary provides an overview of the key findings and insights presented in the master's thesis named "Exploring MINIs contribution to urban ecosystems. Igniting Strategies on heat wave mitigation.". The study investigates the role of the brand MINI, in addressing the pressing issue of urban heat waves and its transformation to an ecosystemfocused contributor. With systemic design, a transition of viewpoint is offered in this thesis, and an additional planet centered approach is used to find new solutions which take the entanglements of the city into consideration. Urban heat waves have become a critical concern within the context of global climate change and urban development. Within the automotive industry, the heat generated by vehicles in cities has been identified as a blind spot that has received insufficient attention in recent decades. With this thesis a possible strategy with examplary interventions to address this gap is derived to make a meaningful contribution. This executive summary outlines the different chapters which include strategies, solutions, and recommendations presented in the thesis to address this challenge. After the introduction and table of figures the following chapters are: Chapter 3 – Background: This chapter introduces the urban heat wave problem and its impacts on urban ecosystems. It highlights the pivotal role of MINI in recognizing the challenge and aligning its strategies with the broader initiatives of urban development. Additionally, a comprehensive trend and context analysis, identifying the crucial role of automobiles in exacerbating this problem. Chapter 4 – Design Process: Chapter 4 explains the Design Process of this Master Thesis in three diamonds, which involves exploration through research, envisioning potential futures and third, defining a strategy for action. Chapter 5 – Stakeholder Analysis: In this chapter the outcome of Interviews conducted with both citizens and experts are presented, to shed light on the system’s issues and deepening the understanding of the problems at hand. Chapter 6 – Co-creation: To foster a co-creative approach, three workshops to facilitate dialogue and solution generation in collaboration with stakeholders where conducted. Chapter 7 – Synthesis: In a final Synthesis a Strategy for MINI is presented with the goal to shift the mindset of citizens and vehicle users through a three step approach. The first step involves raising awareness on heat waves by providing information. The second step focuses on developing vehicles that minimize heat generation. The third and most transformative step encourages a change in consumer mindset towards a concept where individuals gain access to mobility in exchange for contributing to society. The overarching goal is to reduce heat in cities effectively and contribute to the larger city ecosystem. Chapter 8 – Conclusion: By aligning MINIs strategy with the city goals, advocating for sustainable mobility, and collaborating with stakeholders, MINI can strive to create cooler, more sustainable urban environments for all. With the transition of MINI towards an ecosystem mindset and active contribution to the fight against urban heat waves, a transformation of users and citizens mindset can be achieved. The democratization of mobility through collaboration with city governments, citizens, and relevant stakeholders to determine the optimal vehicle solutions is recommended. The recognition that there is no one-size-fits-all solution underscores the need for a democratic approach.

The urge to promote mental health and well-being is gaining increasing importance and attention in recent years. Adolescents, who are among the most vulnerable under this aspect, are experiencing an increase in mental health complaints and need of youth care in the Netherlands. In addition, they perceive current means of care as inappropriate to their needs. Generally, mental healthcare remains hard to access due to its elevated costs and lack of resources. Alternative ways to promote mental well-being appear necessary. These could be provided by implementing design to mediate and promote positive activities through human-product interactions. Teenagers make heavy use of smartphones with continuous internet connection; this creates the possibility to take advantage of digital phenotyping, the practice of gaining information on users’ (mental) state by collecting and interpreting data from smartphones’ sensors and interactions. This system would allow to detect when teenagers experience risk states and provide proper (design) interventions. This project aimed at providing designers with strategies to create interventions promoting teenagers’ mental resilience and well-being through product-mediated activities. The research entailed literature review, interviews with experts and adolescents, examination of tools, prototyping and user evaluation. The Vision in Product design and Contextmapping methods were employed. Academic stress and depressed mood were identified as the two most relevant detectable risk markers for teenagers. The goals of "making adolescents embrace resilience as a collaborative learning process by identifying purpose and stick to congruent behaviour" (for academic stress) and "by reframing negative emotions, translating them into learning opportunities" (for depressed mood) led to the development of 14 intervention design strategies. These are presented in a card deck, whose evaluation stressed the importance of implementation, detailing and user testing to reach intended impact, and the necessity to evaluate and prevent potential counteractive effects. This work contributes to the field of Design for Well-being and specifically to the Smart-CUEing MEntal health research project, whose aim is to promote adolescents’ well-being by implementing digital phenotyping and design interventions.

This project focuses on developing design guidelines for Human-Agent Collaboration around Authority, Autonomy, and Control in the outdoor painting context. While painting as an activity is something most of us have done and understand, working professionals have a sense of pride and skill in their motions that would be difficult to replace with agents. Painters are generally conservative and wary of innovation, as they deeply enjoy the restoration process. Still, they are also a profession that finds it difficult to recruit as many people as before. This project explored how agents could support painters to work sustainably to see what possibilities exist for collaboration. Through a combination of design and research activities, a Design Fiction grounded in painting practice and focused on Authority, Autonomy, and Control was developed. The Design Fiction facilitated discussions with painters around the three themes. From these discussions, design guidelines were developed for each theme. The guidelines contributed to the project's overall goal: understanding how agentic technology could facilitate the sustainable employment of painters.

Robot systems are essentially a new species spreading around us, one that we willingly designed and introduced. Neither a natural species nor a mere human artefact. We have limited information about these smart agents. What do they want, what do you need from us, and how can we find a common ground of understanding to enhance each other through collaboration. Lely took a step into exploring these questions. As a dutch-based company with a diverse portfolio of robot solutions, Lely thrives to bring dairy farming to the future. They cover many tasks assisting farmers and cows in barns worldwide. These increasingly capable entities are no longer tools but partners so we must take the next step into carefully designing our coexistence and collaboration with these robotic systems. After extensive literature on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and research activities with a variety of stakeholders, I developed a Robot Code of Conduct. This code guides developers into designing robotic systems delivering pleasurable, fitting and cohesive interactions. It provides intermediate-level knowledge on robot behavioural design by carrying the reader through three sets of guidelines differing in abstraction and actionability. This project contributes to the field of HRI while spreading awareness of its relevance in practice. The document contains many influential factors that are applied and tailored to designing automated solutions in dairy farming. This document sets a direction and gives concrete guidelines to steer the development of the portfolio towards a vision where all Lely systems work and communicate desirably. Where they communicate as one. I obtained positive results from assessing the content and direction of this document with developers and farmers, however, further tests would be necessary for a more precise validation of this Robot Code of Conduct. Future research would be essential to transition from bringing awareness to relevant factors, to defining more recommendations and appropriate solutions.

This thesis set out to explore the meaning of autonomy and use this knowledge to create a tool for designers to communicate the complexity of the concept with their clients. In today’s society, we value autonomy and we strive to ensure that everyone can lead their life as autonomous as possible. In fact, we view autonomy as ultimate independence and freedom from outside influence. But by insisting so hard on independence and personal responsibility, it can feel like failing if you do not manage to do everything on your own. From the research done in this project, it was found that autonomy is more than being able to do everything yourself. Autonomy actually means making decisions and doing things in a way that you like or need. This can also mean that you do not want, can or should do it alone and that you need or want to be supported by the world around you. You decide yourself, as an individual, who or what can provide that support. The relationships you are part of are part of the context you are in and which can support you the way you want. The insights gained throughout the project are boiled down into a comprehensible framework explaining the different components of autonomy: the individual, important relationships, boundaries of support, and the context. Exploring the framework with designers revealed that the framework could be implemented throughout the design process in different capacities. As the first step to designing with autonomy is understanding what autonomy is, the choice was made to come up with a design for the first phase of the design process. The framework has served as the foundation for the development of a toolkit for designers. The Autonomie voor/in/met/en Design toolkit supports designers in communicating the importance and complexity of autonomy with their clients at the start of a project, by providing tools to uncover assumptions the client might have regarding the autonomy of their target group. While the toolkit is designed for the first phase of the design process, it is the first step in putting autonomy higher on the priority list of designers and clients.

Domestic kitchens are the heart of modern households, a space that embraces social gatherings and most importantly, where pleasures associated with interacting with food arise while cooking and eating. Nevertheless, the way technology is being introduced in this context moves away from this ritual aspect of kitchens as it focuses on a rather rational side, focused on efficiency and functionality to fix undesired problems. The goal of this project has been approaching the introduction of autonomous agents in domestic kitchens in a celebratory way, emphasising the positive aspects of Human-Food interaction with a special focus on culinary creativity. Speculative design has served as a means to set the mindset in the near future and design according to a scenario where kitchen appliances will be smarter and capable of gathering more information from the cooking process. The project has been executed with a strong focus on research, both on a theoretical and user-context level, resulting in the design of a concept that conveys a potential solution for the above-mentioned challenge. Sous, the cooking assistant designed in this thesis responds to the following Design Goal “Gaggenau users should feel like Home Chefs when cooking in their kitchens”. Feeling like a Home Chef involves being the leader of the (domestic) kitchen, feeling in control, exploring creative opportunities, and having a certain level of culinary knowledge. The design revolves around celebratory technologies based on principles of autonomy and embodied interactions, the theoretical background from this project. Sous is a wearable that allows Home Chefs to have a deeper understanding of the preparations being cooked by providing real-time feedback about doneness or sensory aspects among other information. With this, the aim is that Home Chefs would be able to enjoy more the cooking process while ensuring the best result for the dishes they cook. The collaboration that is created when Home Chefs cook with Sous aims to maximise human capacities while maximising the possibilities of technology in a way that ensures both entities’ autonomy and richness of interactions.

With the development of Artificial intelligence and Machine learning capabilities, the connected objects are extended with predictive capabilities, and the character of things is changed to “things that predict” (Smit, 2021). If a connected device is able to embrace a predictive system that not only profiles for scripted behavior but could also use the knowledge co-created by all the other similar devices and their users that encounter similar situations, the predictions can be generated based on that. In this case, a new type of interplay between humans and things called "predictive relation" is created. However, challenges such as the transparency and users' acceptance of predictive behavior of the everyday connected product still require us to figure out before the future takes place. It is urged to understand the now and the future, and this leads to the question: ‘how to design transparent and acceptable predictive relations for the things that predict?’ Therefore, to investigate the question, the project will explore the predictive relations and identify the design qualities for predictive relations between humans and things by taking the XiaoMi’s Vacuum robot as the starting point of the case study. The purpose of this project is to explore the predictive relations and study the transparency and the acceptance of the predictive behavior. In answering the initial research question, this project proposed 2 propositions for transparency and acceptance respectively by combining the insights generated from the case study of XiaoMi’s vacuum robot and the creative session of envisioning the working of predicting vacuum robots. The 2 propositions are evaluated through the method of ‘Wizard-of-oz’ and proved valid by combining the results of quantitative and qualitative research. As one of the results of the evaluation, this project also proposes the idea of “Designer as the facilitator of the human-robot collaboration”. The designers can be the ones who help to bring in the background knowledge and the patterns of the predictive relation and indicate the ways for humans and robots to co-perform reliable and meaningful daily practice in their partnership. Eventually, this project takes designing a guidebook as one of the ways to clarify the idea and integrates the main results of the project into the guidebook to facilitate the collaboration between humans and predicting robots.