This project presents the development and implementation of a toolkit designed to embrace neurodiversity within design teams, fostering inclusivity and enhancing collaboration. Design teams are increasingly recognized for their potential to drive innovation through diversity. However, while diversity in gender, nationality, and expertise has been embraced, neurodiversity remains an overlooked dimension. Neurodiversity refers to the variation in cognitive functioning that naturally occurs within the human population.

Design teams often overlook neurodiversity, missing out on unique perspectives and innovative solutions. Neurodiverse individuals posses unique traits in the form of challenges and strengths which impact team dynamics and performance. This toolkit is designed to help design teams understand and leverage each other’s unique strengths and challenges to foster a more inclusive and collaborative team environment.

The toolkit consists of several key elements: trait cards to help identify and discuss neurodiverse traits, prompt cards to guide structured and meaningful conversations, puzzle pieces to symbolize the unique contributions of each team member, a comic to introduce the concept of neurodiversity in an engaging manner, an instruction sheet for clear guidance, and a sticker sheet for personalizing puzzle pieces. Through these components, the toolkit aims to create a supportive environment where all cognitive styles are valued and leveraged for collective success.

This project underscores the importance of recognizing and embracing neurodiversity, ultimately leading to more effective, collaborative, and innovative design teams.

Every human being and every conscious life form on this planet aims to be happy. Happiness is something everyone is after - consciously or unconsciously. People try to ‘achieve’ it through various actions that are meaningful to them. There are many definitions and interpretations of happiness. Gautam Buddha wisely once said- “There is no path to happiness, happiness is the path.” One tends to naturally wonder whether happiness is a journey, a state, a ‘thing’ to be achieved or is it an object of value? It can best be defined as a state for which certain preconditions are necessary. Many scholars have studied how Architecture and Urban spaces influence our state of happiness.
This project aimed to create positive design interventions in the transition space of the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft. These interventions will provide moments of happiness and support a positive state of mind during the daily journey of users across the transition space. The project aimed to find out how best to apply the 20 Urban Happiness Ingredients tool set by Samavati and
Desmet (2021)4 to design a transition experience. Insights from Generative Research were used to conduct Research through Design that used a Positive Design Approach. The main insights found were that the users of the IDE transition space needed to feel the fundamental human needs of security, autonomy and stimulation while in transition. A number of ideation iterations led to the conception of an arch that supported those three needs. The arch was chosen as the embodiment of those needs because historically, it has always been a powerful metaphor for communicating and aiding transition. It allows the bi-directional nature of a transition to be a function, it has deep cultural meanings and it has the ability to frame a great view.
The result of this graduation project is a spatial installation (or spatial product) called ‘Waves of Happiness’. It creates several moments of joy through the interactions that have been designed. The meaning created by the design is that the users must choose to take a meaningful pause while in transition to momentarily forget their worries by experiencing pleasure. These moments of pleasure remind one of pleasant memories such as childhood. The design also builds upon the need for users to practice self reflection and fulfil the virtue of self-care. The form and aesthetics of the design played an important role in satisfying the universal need for beauty. Computational Design techniques were used to design the structure depicting the ‘Waves of Happiness’. User feedback indicated that the users would exit the designed transition experience with a positive state of mind after having experienced moments of joy.
‘Compatibility with needs and desires of users’, Interactive and fascinating design’, ‘Multisensory richness experiences’, ‘Place identity, memorability & city image’ and ‘Aesthetic qualities’ were the 5 main Urban Happiness Ingredients used in the design. The project ended with a discussion on how these ingredients can be applied better to transition experience design and what this master thesis project contributed to the domain of transition experience design.

Organisations have a lot of trouble with managing their portfolio.
The portfolio is the set of projects the company is currently running. The consultancy Jigseye provides tools for that purpose called Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM). They created tools to support organisations in creating that overview and the next step to manage it as a process. Currently, the SPM tools implemented by Jigseye work in practice. They notice that orgnizations still face challenges reaching successful SPM execution. Jigseye wants to improve and extend this set of tools. The goal of my project is to gain an understanding of the SPM tools and design for the new tools with orientation on useability and ease of use. In the research phase, I did extensive user research analysing the SPM tool resulting in user needs for functionality accessibility and the new purpose of creating strategic awareness. Leading to the following vision; the vision is laid out in the form of a journey, leading to new opportunities. This will increase both the effectiveness and efficiency of the SPM tools. Resulting in the New SPM Identity model and New SPM App design with Mobile version; with these tools, designing for a new way of working in the SPM journey leading to new service opportunities for Jigseye.

The project aims at designing a visitor research toolkit for Museum Catharijneconvent, a museum of religious art in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The project includes exploring a new experience of attending visitor research and the supplementary toolkit for MCC staffs to conduct it. The project would also be a practice of utilising two museum experience related theories, the Falk & Dierking’s identity-related motivations and Relevance by Play.The project is conducted following the double-diamond design process model. The research phase is for Diverge and Converge, including 3 main research tasks in parallel. 1. Interviews and context mapping are conducted to learn the context of MCC and the condition of visitor research. Based on the result, visitor research for finding inspiration for the theme of a temporary exhibition is chosen to be the focus in this project.2. Online questionnaires and interviews are conducted to learn visitor’s opinions about visitor research of museums. The result revealed that visitors have relatively positive attitudes towards the museums they visit. They regard an interesting experience and feedbacks as incentives of attending visitor research. 3. Interviews were used to learn MCC staffs’ attitudes towards the two theories and find out their possible roles in this project. Falk & Dierking’s identity-related motivations could be embedded in the toolkit as MCC staffs are familiar with it. While Relevance by Play might help the design of new visitor research experience directly in this project.Building upon this, the design goal was formulated:Design a toolkit for visitor researches to find inspiration for the developing temporary exhibition and provide visitors with a participatory museum experience through the visitor research during their visit in MCC.The exploration and ideation phase was for Develop, to discover different design possibilities. With ideas gathered from creative sessions, 3 primary concepts were generated. After a quick evaluation with stakeholders, one of the concepts was chosen for further development. For Deliver, there are 2 phases, Concept development and Validation & iteration.The final design concept turns the visitor research into an interactive mini-exhibition which can attract visitors. It includes a designed visitor journey of attending the visitor research, a tentative space for its conduction, a platform for visitors to share opinions and a management platform for MCC exhibition team to monitor the research.For validation, user tests were conducted with potential visitors and MCC staffs. Walkthrough video of the desired visitor’s journey was used to help testers to understand the context and experience of attending the visitor research. Interactive prototypes of the interfaces of the sharing platform and the management platform were used to test their usability. SUS, UEQ, 7-point Likert Scale and interviews were combined to gain feedback. Then a quick iteration was made based on the result. Finally, a discussion was given about the contribution, limitation and suggestion for further exploration and development.Overall, the project is an explorative practice of a new way of visitor research for Museum Catharijneconvent and a practice of utilising Relevance by Play.

“It’s a given that parenting is hard work. But when you’re raising a child with special needs, the level of care and stress is not just higher, it shifts the foundations of families and adds unimaginable complexities for everyone involved.” (Pinhorn, 2018, www.gottman.com)This project is developed in collaboration with The Ontzorghuis, a Dutch organisation founded to support parents of children with special needs. This assignment aims to enhance the capabilities of the CSN parents’ community to fulfill their basic psychological needs, which are essential for psychological health and well-being (Decy & Ryan, 2008).Inspired by the Capability approach (Alkire & Deneulin, 2009; Sen, 2004; Nussbaum, 2001) a qualitative study was conducted to evaluate the common capabilities that characterise the CSN parents’ community, as well as the individual practices or paths of success that parents come up with to deal with their challenging circumstances. The study consisted of initial desk research based on the social media expression of CSN parents and remote field research that involved 6 CSN parents who participated in a series of generative research exercises and interviews. An innovative approach for remote user research is presented. It is based on metaphorical visualization exercises that are able to engage a sensitive community with little time available into a conversation about intimate and relevant topics that are often difficult to share.The findings collected from this research narrowed down the scope of this project into the topic of future thinking. Many parents experience fear and anxiety when facing the big unknown that supposes having a life-long dependent child. Their capability to think about the future appears as a decisive factor in their wellbeing. The proposed solution, Future Journeys tool, integrates the concept of Resourcefulness (Giaccardi & Nicenboim, 2018) into the context of future thinking. While the capabilities of this community are significantly reduced, the opposite may happen with their resourcefulness (ability to creatively adapt to challenges for which no commonly agreed solution was available). Future Journeys leverages the creative ways of approaching future thinking of some individuals to expand the perspective of relatable others who, although in similar circumstances, experience a negative relationship with the unknown future. The proposed tool is presented with the shape of a mobile phone application that aims to provide CSN parents with a common language to reflect and share their perspectives about future thinking. The solution promotes self-reflection through an exercise of guided metaphorical thinking and completes the experience with social interactions where the users share their perspectives to inspire others. This solution enhances the basic psychological needs of CSN parents. The impact of the tool on its users’ wellbeing was evaluated taking into account Self Determination Theory’s three fundamental needs. Furthermore, the results provided valuable insight into the potential of the tool to expand the capabilities of the CSN parents’ community and helped to draw further recommendations for the future development of the tool.

This graduation project was a collaboration between TU Delft and VanBerlo, a strategic and product design agency based in the Netherlands. The motivation of this project was to understand how the Design for Transitions team, a part of VanBerlo, can start to apply Systemic design within their design practice. This team addresses societal and transition challenges that often present multi stakeholder, fuzzy contexts. Systemic design and its applicability in dealing with complex, multi-stakeholder, open and fuzzy problems could offer value to the DfT teams approach. First, two explorative research questions were posed. One, was to find out how DfT conducts their design activities and what is their current design approach. This was established through interviews with DfT designers and by studying past projects. Alongside, a second exploration was conducted on the field of systemic design and a key practice in it: visualization. By studying scientific publications, exploring resources such as yearly conferences and events, theoretical knowledge on this field was established. Additionally, designers who are systemic design practitioners were interviewed to learn from their experience on how they applied this field into practice. The resulting outcome was a set of principles and practices that were evident in professional systemic design practice. By combining insights from the two streams of explorations, four opportunity areas were determined where DfT’s design process could benefit from systemic design. The opportunity areas were: Frame the brief as a complex systemic design challenge, study human insights in the form of relationships, conduct the synthesis of data and knowledge in relationships and lastly, apply visualization for sense making and sense sharing. These four opportunity areas outlined techniques, tools and methods that could be further explored. To establish the context in which these opportunity areas could be explored, two design challenges addressed by DfT were taken up. The resulting solutions were a set of tools and templates that were informed by the opportunity areas. These solutions were applied in the design process of each of the two challenges and an evaluation could be conducted with internal designers from DfT. The resulting insights were useful to learn what solutions worked and to determine the feasibility of systemic design overall for VanBerlo. In order to achieve the goal of the project, that is to help the DfT team apply systemic design into their practice, the revised tools and templates were gathered into a resource named The Systemic Design Toolbox. This toolbox introduced the very first steps for how DfT and the studio at large could begin to explore systemic design. Each tool is presented with a guide to illustrate what value the use of it offers, what outputs can be expected and instructions plus templates that support the use of the tool. Overall, the outcomes of this graduation were very well received by VanBerlo and indicate promise to become the path, in not only applying systemic design, but sensitizing the studio on the changing landscape of design and the need for adopting new skills as designers.

In the Netherlands, 2,5 million people are low-literate, which means they have trouble with reading, writing, numeracy or digital skills. As a result, they can experience difficulty with everyday tasks such as making a grocery list or taking public transport. Low-literacy negatively impacts both the individual as well as society. Despite efforts to address low-literacy, the percentage of low-literates is rising. It is not just the older generation, five percent of 16-24-year-olds are low-literate, and children of low-literate parents are three times more likely to become low-literate themselves than other children are. Two-thirds of low-literates in the Netherlands are natives, but in practice, they are the group reached less by literacy efforts. They are often ashamed and successful at hiding it because they are fluent speakers. Those in programmes are often already in mature adulthood, whereas for both the individual and society it would be beneficial if education is sought earlier in life. Therefore, this thesis tries to design an intervention reach and activate a younger group to want to address their literacy issues. The main research question is: “What are the barriers and enablers to reach and activate native Dutch low- literates, in particular, young parents?”Because low-literacy is a social problem, both the individual and societal perspective is explored: the individual perspective through interviews with the target group, the societal perspective through desk-research, and both through conversations with employees at Stichting Lezen & Schrijven who have much experience with the topic. These explorations resulted in ten design factors that serve as a basis for the intervention, as well as the insight that the low-literate’s dependency on those around him as well as the government, might be the core of the problem. As a result of this dependency, people’s self-efficacy can be diminished. A third perspective, a theoretical one, focussed on self-efficacy and related constructs, is taken. This perspective resulted in 18 extra design factors. At the same time of the theoretical exploration, the design of the intervention was started, in this way both influenced each other in the focus they had. The 19 theoretical factors go beyond the context of low-literacy and could, therefore, be applied to design projects that wish to increase self-efficacy. Resulting from insights based on context and theory, a design intervention is created that focusses on supporting young low-literate parents to engage with their children in the context of literacy through crafting. The design intervention is proposed to be offered as a promotional 11-week programme at a supermarket, available to all parents of young children, as a way to not single out those that are low-literate. The crafting instruction contains very little text, nevertheless the difficulty will slowly rise each week, the goal is to make the parent feel capable (self-efficacious) but at the same time show them they could benefit from improving their skills. The design is evaluated with professionals and users, showing that it is overall well-liked but the link to education could be improved. Due to time limitations, it was not possible to assess whether the intervention manages to increase self-efficacy, a pilot is proposed as a way to verify the effectiveness of the design. As a result of these evaluations, a final design is created that incorporates reading of the instruction even more fully.