We are on the verge of reversing a technological paradox. With the right steps, we can leverage the power of artificial intelligence to revolutionize the world of smart kitchen appliances. Imagine a kitchen where your fridge, oven, and cooking hob understand and anticipate your needs, making cooking a breeze and a joy. Generative AI, especially Large Language Models (LLMs), have given us a way to communicate naturally and humanly with machines. It’s almost like having a personal chef who knows exactly what you want, how you like it, and is ready to assist at any moment.

Now, think about your current smart kitchen appliances. They have amazing features, but how often do you find yourself frustrated by complicated settings or unintuitive controls? What if your kitchen as a whole, could not only understand your commands but also learn and adapt to your cooking habits? Let’s pose a question: “In the age of commercially available AI, what could we, as makers of kitchen appliances, do for you to make you choose our products and stay loyal to our brand?” Perhaps this next paraphrased question makes it more answerable – “For what job would you hire any of these appliances that we sell, to assist you in the kitchen?”

This project aims to kick off with the notion of getting GPTs to generate recipes and functions for the appliances. It studies consumers’ experiences modern kitchen appliances to understand what they truly need, want, and expect from a smart kitchen. It starts with a thorough exploration through literature reviews, online community trends, and direct user research to gather deep insights through experiments and interviews. These insights are then transformed into practical use cases for AI models. By crowdsourcing data, we create detailed user personas that showcase how personalized AI can elevate the cooking experience. We test the capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4 to design an actionable solution that ASKO can integrate into their future appliance lineup.

The result? A set of affordances of this proposed interface, a set of personas and a thorough understanding of market and customer value, complemented by a strategic story that outlines the logic necessary to deliver an extraordinary brand experience for ASKO consumers. Picture a kitchen where your oven knows the perfect temperature for your favourite dish, your fridge suggests recipes based on its contents, and your cooking hob adjusts its heat just the way you like it. This is not just a vision for the future—it’s a reality we are building today. By embracing this innovative approach, ASKO can lead the charge in transforming kitchens into intelligent, responsive, and delightful spaces, ensuring customer satisfaction and unwavering brand loyalty.

In an era where digitalisation has revolutionised people’s lives, it is vital to make this transition accessible to everybody, or at least to the many, so that more people may benefit from it. The European Accessibility Act of 2025 (Forum, 2020) is a key stimulus for this, as it mandates organisations to be more inclusive of individuals with disabilities. The retail business is no exception, and as one of the world’s leading retailers, IKEA has stepped up its efforts to address accessibility issues. People with vision disabilities who rely heavily on screen readers, are among its initial customer segments. However, this group is relevant for more reasons than one as revealed by this thesis, the most important of them being- shopping at IKEA is a very visual experience, making it inaccessible to navigate for individuals with any sort of vision disabilities. The project narrows its focus to IKEA stores, where visual elements combine with the physical obstacles of navigating a giant indoor maze for customers with vision disabilities. At the store, these customers interact with various stakeholders like store co-workers, digital co- workers, and other customers. This project thus takes a strategic approach by considering the larger whole that the problem is part of. Through numerous touchpoints with stakeholders, it was revealed that navigation is not a problem specific to IKEA, but is common to other large retailers. What makes IKEA unique however, is that customers visit not only to buy products but also to gather inspiration for their homes and larger life experiences. Thus, IKEA’s 1:1 showroom space becomes a crucial component to allow customers to imagine their dream homes come alive. Unfortunately, this part of the showroom is exclusionary due to its emphasis on visual components. As a result, this thesis reframes the problem: how might we make inspiration at IKEA more accessible for customers with vision disabilities? Despite having a more defined focus, stakeholder group, and problem scope, designing was not easy. To be understandable and successful, design relies greatly on visual skills. However, planning for and working with persons with vision problems required adapting typically visual processes to a non-visual context. This is how the intended intervention, Trails, came to be. It is a service in which sighted customers leave trails of curated home and product inspiration for customers with sight disabilities. The ‘curation’ highlights the most popular or preferred products and home inspiration based on customer reviews and ratings. An audio layer brings Trails to life and guides customers through specific parts of the showroom while advising them on how best to touch and experience the products in those parts, combining audio and tactile communication for people with vision disabilities. After being developed and tested with customers at the context of use- an IKEA store, the desirability and feasibility of the intervention had been established, but its viability remained to be checked. Therefore, discussions with various IKEA teams and blind testing with non-disabled customers took place to ground the intervention further and understand its profitability for a wider audience. Though creating an accessible digital solution would remove barriers for customers with vision disabilities, if their environment remained unwelcoming and hostile, they would still feel devalued and excluded. Ultimately, this project evolved from enhancing accessibility to fostering inclusion at IKEA.

This graduation report presents a comprehensive approach to the identification of an opportunity in the rising technology and interests in generative AI. The report delivers a concept for a tool that is designed for managers. The tool is aimed at aiding in the integration of generative AI within teams. The project is grounded in a literature review, stakeholder interviews, a co-design session with students, a survey with stakeholders and validating. The literature review shows there is an expected rise in interests and demand for using the new technology of generative AI. The interviews with stakeholders shine light on the necessary means that are needed to integrate generative AI in the workplace. Some of these means are: more knowledge, more experience and a starting point. The co-design session brought new perspectives on solutions and opportunities that the tool could incorporate to be successful. The major breakthrough of the co-design session is the implementation of employee interaction. In the value survey it is shown that the managers do not want too much insights in their employee behavior and would prefer a personalized document of advice for implementation. At the end of the development stage the concept is shown to the target audience who give their option on how well it manages to fulfill its purpose. The responses are positive enough that only minor suggestions are given to improve the concept. The final concept tool offers multiple options to achieve the desired solution. Using the profile of the manager and of their employees, the tool provides personalized advice to enhance decision making and awareness of actions. In addition, the tool incorporates employee interaction, enabling team members to unknowingly contribute to the insights that further refine the advice that the manager gets. The tool does not only offer advice, it also offers training and educational components to further provide managers with the skills needed to navigate the fast changing landscape of generative AI integration. The report contributes by collecting and transforming valuable insights and translating that into written output which can be used in the future for development in the generative AI area. The paper also offers a concept for a practical tool designed to prepare, deal and thrive within the generative AI powered workplace. This concept can be used as a reference point for projects that aim to design a similar tool.

This study develops a roadmap to guide the integration of robotic technologies into Dutch agriculture in a responsible manner that benefits farmers and the environment.
The Dutch agricultural sector faces challenges from climate change, labor shortages, and sustainability pressures. Robotics shows promise in addressing these issues through applications like precision farming and reducing physical demands. However, widespread adoption of these technologies has been limited due to barriers like high costs, reliability concerns, lack of awareness among farmers, and uncertainty. A more strategic and coordinated approach is needed to responsibly introduce robotics into Dutch agriculture in a way that benefits all stakeholders over the long run.
An extensive literature review explored technology trends, agricultural challenges, and stakeholder perspectives. Insights informed the creation of a future vision and three-horizon roadmap using a strategic planning process combined with speculative design techniques. Validation gathered feedback from industry experts.
The roadmap envisions autonomous agriculture empowering resilient food systems through three horizons of Raising Awareness, Community Building, and Fostering Wellbeing, towards the future vision:
The future of agriculture is an automated and sustainable system which enables farmers to sustain the longevity and resilience of their farming business.
By providing structured guidance, the roadmap aims to help stakeholders overcome adoption barriers and establish the Netherlands as a leader in sustainable and resilient farming. If adopted systematically, the roadmap could transform Dutch agriculture globally through robotics.

In the early conceptual stage of design, novice designers and professionals experience different levels of fixation. Design tools and workflows can support designers to explore creative opportunities. Patent data tool for engineering design purposes is one example, using the design-by-analogy method to facilitate divergent ideation. This work will examine how designers can use the patent stimuli to explore both design problems and solutions and in what way.
The study applied a within-subject experiment with 6 participants. Each participant did brainstorming tasks with patent data tool and baseline tool. After the experiment, they gave feedbacks on the patent data tool. The concurrent think-aloud protocol, screen recording and idea sketches were used for explorative data analysis.
From the participants' self-report, they all gave positive feedbacks on the tool's value for acquiring new knowledge for divergent ideation. External raters clustered all the ideas by categories, following function-behavior-structure theory model. The overall fixation rate in the patent data condition did not bypass the baseline condition. From qualitative analysis on the ideation process, the patent data tool effectively eliminated knowledge-based fixation in the query stage. Its textual stimuli helped to release conceptual fixation if they were not exposed to solution visuals. The patent stimuli inspired participants with solution directly but did not provide problems consistently. The limitations of patent data tools are discussed. It points out the possibilities of using supplementary tools to better support exploration on problems, using analogies and thinking at an abstract level and overcoming conceptual fixation.
Lastly, future studies are needed to look into a combination of new tools to work with the patent data tool. Designers begin with understanding problem and user contexts from common sense knowledge tool. Afterwards, the patent data and biological-inspired tool can facilitate designers to ideate desired functions and related product behaviors. Ultimately, text to generative image tool can help conceptualize structural design. Future studies are needed to evaluate the effect of this new method.