As global air travel continues to rise, airports are investing in smoother passenger experiences: particularly during the departure process. Yet for many passengers, the moment of arrival remains stressful. At airports, this problem is particularly present for leisure passengers carrying heavy baggage. This thesis investigates how the Bag-to-Remote concept (wherein checked baggage is delivered directly from the airport to the passenger’s hotel) can enhance the arrival experience. Based on a user-centred design approach and structured by the Double Diamond model, the research consists of passenger interviews, expert consultations, journey mapping, case studies, and design methods to uncover insights across the baggage journey.The findings show that passengers experience peak stress at two moments: waiting for baggage and continuing onward travel. For families and group passengers in particular, baggage creates a mental and physical burden. Interviews and evaluations confirmed that passengers would value a service that removes this burden, as long as it is built into trust, integrated seamlessly into existing booking and travel routines, and clearly demonstrate relief. As a solution for this problem, the thesis proposes a modular, opt-in Bag-to-Remote service built on those three core principles: trust, integration, and relief. Passengers can join the service at five different stages: from booking their trip until arriving at the airport. Each stage is linked to a tiered benefit level. The service is supported by six key features, including one-click airline and/or airport integration, real-time tracking via email and a personal bag portal, and physical service closure via baggage tags. A detailed service blueprint visualizes how frontstage passenger actions align with possible backstage logistics.The proposed solution not only offers value to the passengers, but also airlines, airport operators, customs authorities, hotels, and logistics partners. The thesis also outlines a three-phase roadmap for implementation: a pilot phase, scaling up, and full integration. In conclusion, Bag-to-Remote is more than a convenience service. By transforming the baggage journey from a burden into a supportive, passenger-centred solution, the service has the potential to redefine arrival at airports, seeking to modernize the arrival journey experience. ... Read more

The adoption of ChatGPT among students for academic assistance, including report writing, has sparked debates on its integration into secondary education. Despite initial resistance, ChatGPT has firmly entrenched itself in secondary schools, necessitating a comprehensive exploration of its adoption and the design strategies to facilitate this process. This project, conducted in collaboration with SCO Delft and Christelijk Lyceum Delft (CLD), aimed to investigate the adoption of Generative AI in secondary education and propose design solutions to support this integration.

Research encompassed both the current landscape and future prospects of secondary education. Interviews with stakeholders, desk research, and semi-structured interviews with CLD teachers shed light on the current adoption of ChatGPT and the associated challenges, including biases, inaccuracies, and privacy concerns. Despite its potential benefits, inappropriate use among students and limited engagement from teachers due to time constraints and lack of training were identified.

Using the Vision in Product Design (ViP) approach, the project anticipated future scenarios and identified teachers' predominant mindset as social and motivated. Design efforts focused on accommodating this mindset while acknowledging teachers' time constraints. A problem statement emerged, highlighting the need for teachers to develop knowledge of Generative AI amidst demanding schedules and unclear guidance.

Concept prototypes, including a lesson module and a website, were developed and iteratively tested at CLD. Feedback sessions with teachers informed refinements, resulting in effective solutions that addressed teachers' needs and expectations. A roadmap for integrating Generative AI into secondary education by August 2026 was devised, emphasizing collaboration, knowledge sharing, and experimentation. CLD and SCO Delft are positioned as potential leaders, leveraging their insights and concept prototypes to drive adoption across schools.

Ultimately, the project underscores the inevitability of Generative AI in education and the importance of teaching students to use and critique it effectively. Teachers play a crucial role in guiding students and should be supported with ready-made teaching materials, professional development opportunities, and ongoing discussions. Government regulation is essential to ensure privacy and accessibility for all. As AI evolves rapidly, the roadmap must be regularly reviewed and adapted to remain relevant and effective. ... Read more

Due to an increase in remote working concerns around mental and physical health are increasing. Most people are aware of this problem, but find it hard to improve their health. Recharge is a company that wants to help these people by providing an app where users experience an one-week Bootcamp. In this week they are challenged to try out new healthy exercises to break old habits and kickstart new ones.

However, Recharge had the problem that users lost interest after interacting with the app. This sparked the opportunity for this project. To explore what caused users to lose motivation and how design can play a role to engage and motivate users to finish the Recharge week.

The project started with a literature research on Recharge and the integration of design on the topics motivation and engagement. As a result, a journey roadmap and a user scenario was developed to get an overview of the company and the service they provide. Furthermore, a framework was developed on what features can boost motivation in design, and engagement guidelines were formulated. It appeared that the app was lacking in providing community feelings, creating personalization and customization features and providing enough feedback.

To confirm these results, in-depth interviews were conducted with current Recharge users. The interviews confirmed the previous insights and showed the value of adding guidance throughout the app, smaller tasks and prioritizing and reflecting on health more regularly. With these final insights, a design direction and vision were formulated.

In the developing stage brainstorming, experimentation and user tests were performed to iteratively develop the final concept. The concept consists of a new onboarding experience where users experience more choice freedom in picking their goals and obstacles. Furthermore, well-being questionnaires were formulated to measure the success of the week and guides users to see what they want to achieve.

A new checkbox system was developed where users could customize their tasks, participate in smaller tasks and personal recommendations were displayed based on the onboarding data. At last, reflection activities were added where users could select statements to make it easier to reflect on their day and a final survey of the week was added.

During the last user test more feedback and reflection activities were added to the concept, for example adding a final summary at the end of the onboarding, day and week. In the daily overview users could reflect on the tasks by ranking them in a top 3 category. Furthermore, after every small task and at the end of the day/week users could check their progress.

Although the last recommendations were applied, there was still room for improvement. To push Recharge in the right direction a strategic roadmap was created for the coming 2 years. This roadmap consists of the future user focus, future features, feasibility and the METUX spheres. At last, an evaluation of the project was conducted with it’s main takeaways and limitations. Finally, the project ends with a personal reflection on my ambition and learning curve. ... Read more

Our world climate is an incredibly complex and ever-changing system. The reality of climate change and the consequential pressure to act fast to reduce greenhouse gas emissions requires immediate attention. And yet, despite this unprecedented urgency, active public engagement needed to motivate meaningful change is still missing.

This graduation project explores how to utilize Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) – a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) – to motivate public engagement through the emotion of fascination and element of play. The final design of this exploration is an interactive exhibition piece that allows its users to create novel, AI-generated landscapes.

In the first phase of the project, hands-on exploration of the use of GANs as a design opportunity was conducted and the experiences of the exploration process documented. Further research through interviews with climate researchers and literature review into the topics of climate change helped to get an understanding of the climate context and map out and narrow down the solution space for the following ideation phase. The context research revealed that the current climate debate is deeply emotional, with mostly negative emotions like fear and hopelessness in its center. Yet, it was also found that fostering positive emotions like fascination and joy is a potential means to increase interest and motivate people to engage with climate initiatives. Based on the context exploration, a series of design prototypes were created and tested with participants to inform the final design.

The final concept LANDSHAPES is an interactive exhibition piece intended for the museum context. It features a circular projection of AI-generated aerial landscapes – images that look real, yet have never been seen by anyone before. The installation enables participants to become absorbed in the morphing landscapes and experience their potential impact on our surroundings in a playful, open-ended manner.
A preliminary installation was evaluated with participants using qualitative methods of observation and interviews. The installation evoked a deep sense of beauty, calmness, and inspiration that contributed to a meditation-like, engaging experience. Even without a predefined narrative, participants automatically associated the morphing images with our changing planet and ascribed meaning to the abstract visuals. The addition of control over the moving landscapes resulted in a mindset shift, as the experience transformed from a passive and meditative experience to an experience with additional cognitive involvement. The preference of experience differed between participants.

The design research conducted in this project strengthens the assumption that experiences with positive emotion in its center can be used to foster initial engagement with the topic of climate change. Furthermore, it showed that GAN technology can be used to evoke an emotional response, which offers interesting opportunities for future work. More specifically, the research suggests the potential for further development of playful experiences to make climate data accessible and engaging to the general public, as well as an opportunity to explore GANs that utilize emotional value as an input to generate targeted media that reinforces or counteracts the viewer’s emotional response. ... Read more

The role that smart technologies play and the data they generate is becoming central in cities; cities are adopting technologies as a new way of governance and making policies based on data. Increasingly, governments and companies implement data-driven strategies, and the number of sensors in the public space is increasing. This translates into abysmal amounts of data about people, their behavior and habits. While the use of smart technologies in cities and specifically in Amsterdam has many potential benefits—from improving local economy and transportation to quality of life and e-governance—there is a growing concern about the ethical risks. Martinez-Balleste et al. (2013) identify that their use in cities jeopardize citizens’ privacy. Moreover, one of the main problems of smart technologies in the public realm is that they are often placed without users’ consent and without providing any notice of their presence. At the same time, the attitude of smart city residents towards this new paradigm — along with the ethical, social and privacy implications that derive from it — is one of indifference. The misalignment between smart city residents attitudes and privacy behaviour is what motivates this project. This project aims to engage smart city residents with smart technologies in order to create awareness, better understanding of the privacy implications and build a democratic process for smart cities. The design solution focuses on empowering smart city users by making smart technologies, its privacy implications and data insights legible for users. By building this knowledge and making privacy implications more visible, users will be able to notice smart technologies in the public realm and spread awareness. Moreover, they will be better equipped to make inform decisions about smart city projects and co-shape the city they envision. ... Read more

When building online systems designers have to make many decisions that impact user experience. One of said choices is whether certain interactions are automated or remain human. To make matters more complicated, they can also decide to make certain interactions seem automated or human. Making the right decision has increased in importance as more of our interactions are taking place online. Context The aim of this thesis is to discover if guidelines can be developed to facilitate designers when making these decisions. It does so by taking a new dating app called Breeze as a use case. This dating app is different compared to existing dating apps because it automates the date arrangement process. Instead of being able to swipe through profiles and chat with matches, users receive two profiles per day and directly fill in a date picker when matched. Breeze then arranges the date and lets the match know where to be at what time. The app faces the problem that many of the dates get canceled because users stop responding during the date arrangement process. User research reveals that, by having limited online interaction, this process has become impersonal, anonymous and inflexible which makes it easy to dehumanize your match. Dehumanization leads to loss of commitment when arranging a date. This leads to the research question: What would the impact on commitment and the overall user experience when this process would instead be humanized? And how can these learnings help designers of other online systems decide when and how to humanize interaction? Theory To answer these questions, this thesis first elaborates why dehumanization is inevitable when interaction is mediated by technology. Dehumanization can be mitigated by humanizing interaction. However simply humanizing interaction is not the solution because, apart from its advantages it too has disadvantages. The ideal balance between dehumanization and humanization depends on the type of platform in question. Findings Through conducting two Build-Measure-Learn loops, this thesis finds that the ideal balance does not only differ between platforms but also differs within the customer journey of one platform. Within each step of the journey, users have different interaction needs, which not only depends on why they decided to interact with the system in the first place, but also with whom they are interacting at that point. Additionally the companies that build these systems also have conflicting needs, which depend on their strategy and available resources. Result In order to find this ideal balance between humanization and dehumanization, this thesis proposes the Framework for humanized interaction. This framework is validated through conducting expert interviews, a pilot with an external company and by applying it to the use case. The latter results in new concepts and recommendations suitable for implementation by Breeze. ... Read more

Artificial Intelligence can extend human frontiers and complement our capabilities. This project presents AI-powered smart glasses that empower visually impaired people to achieve greater independence and social integration. Since AI is a developing discipline, we enhance reliability by providing the opportunity for reciprocal learning between AI and its users. ... Read more

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.
... Read more

About 65 million global disable population require a wheelchair to keep mobility. However, long-term depending on wheelchairs has intensified the burden on the social economy and brought enormous challenges to wheelchair users health. Physical issues such as body pain, pressure sore, muscle injury and weakness, and cardiopulmonary weakness happen quite often among wheelchair users because of various poor long-term habits including, improper sitting postures, prolonged sitting, upper extremity overuse, and lack of exercise engagement. To solve these problems, wheelchair users have to change their habits.
Self-tracking based on emerging sensing technologies combined with the personal informatics might be a promising way to motivate behavior change. Such products have been applied in sports and monitoring chronic diseases such as migraines, diabetes, and allergies. The abundance of commercial smart trackers can also prove that self-tracking is competent to help users to self-understand, make plans, and finally, change habits. However, there are no available self-logging products specifically designed for wheelchair users. Furthermore, because of the limitation of their bodies and different needs from regular people, wheelchair users can hardly find suitable commercial products.
To solve these problems, a smart connected wheelchair system is designed which applies emerging self-tracking technologies and machine learning. The wheelchair can monitor postures, sedentary time, upper extremity muscle load, exercise level, and energy expenditure. The App associated can record and report this data for users' better self-understanding. Various strategies for motivating behavior changing, including goal-setting, reward, self-monitoring, and sharing, are also integrated into this system. In this way, wheelchair users can make new plans according to their data and keep moving toward a healthier lifestyle.
An agile design approach in combination with technology-driven rapid prototyping, which includes multiple iterations of technology experimentation, prototype development, and user test, was adopted throughout this project. In the prototyping phase, the concept was divided into three parts including sitting, muscle, and cardiopulmonary. Three generations of the prototype were then built, focusing on validating the sitting aspect of the concept from the technical perspective. By utilizing a simple machine learning algorithm, the function has been realized with a relatively satisfying accuracy. It turns out that the concept has potential to benefit wheelchair users in the future. ... Read more

Escape the Smart City is a critical pervasive game for creating awareness about the implications of AI-surveillance technology in the smart city. It responds to growing concerns over the mass deployment of surveillance cameras that are enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) which are turning the cities into digital panopticons (Sadowski & Pasquale, 2015). Such concerns are amplified by the central role played by multinational corporations in developing the technologies that are said to render the city “smart”.
The technologies behind AI-surveillance are proprietary and the nature of it is inherently a “black-box” which inhibits public from understanding it and having a say in its deployment. Due to this reason, the citizens that live in the cities with smart surveillance are often left behind not informed enough about the consequences of the pervasive technology in their environment.
This research addresses this lack of awareness by creating an escape room like experience around the city where players locate hidden surveillance cameras, discover algorithmic biases, and try to fool facial detection algorithm in order to go against a fictional all-seeing AI-surveillance system. Consistent with Flanagan’s (2009) critical play model, the 8 problems of AI-surveillance defined in the research are communicated by the game’s procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007).
It also questions whether critical pervasive games — which are the combination of critical design (Dunne & Raby, 2013) and pervasive games (Montola et al., 2009) — is possible of merging the ordinary world with the fictional game world to create a safe space to explore complex socio-technical problems in compelling, relatable ways. 
Through the play-test, it was made clear that by providing the players with interactive feedback on how AI-surveillance would perceive the world, the players were able to get a sense of the black boxed nature of AI and ask critical questions about their necessity and consequences. Also, the in-situ experience outside created a heightened awareness of existing surveillance infrastructures. ... Read more