Venipuncture is a common medical procedure that can cause significant stress and anxiety in children, often intensifying their perception of pain. Virtual Reality (VR) has been explored as a distraction method, but its fully immersive nature can lead to a loss of control, as children are disconnected from their surroundings. This project investigates Augmented Reality (AR) as an alternative distraction tool, allowing children to remain aware of their environment while still engaging in an immersive experience.

The research aimed to answer the question:
How can an AR experience be designed for venipuncture procedures to effectively distract children aged 6–12, reducing their perception of pain and anxiety while maintaining their sense of control?

A combination of theoretical research, patient journey mapping, and co-creation with children was conducted to gain insights into effective distraction strategies. Three child archetypes were identified—The Monitor, The Curious, and The Blunter—each representing different coping styles during venipuncture. Next to that, to enhance the AR experience, pre- and post-procedure experiences are crucial to address.
Based on these insights, the FireFly Forest was developed: an experience that transforms mandatory procedure steps into rewarding challenges. The design includes interactive fireflies, a guided breathing exercise, and positive reinforcement elements to support children throughout the procedure. To evaluate the effectiveness of the design, an AR prototype was built in Unreal Engine and tested in a simulated, non-medical venipuncture setting with children aged 9–11. The results indicated that the experience was engaging, intuitive, and effective in shifting focus away from the procedure. Children described the experience as calming and enjoyable.

Beyond the AR experience itself, the project explored pre- and post-procedure interventions to enhance effectiveness. Two additional concepts were developed: Lumi’s Portal, a waiting room interaction to introduce the AR experience before the procedure, and Lumi’s Adventure Booklet, a sticker-based reward system reinforcing positive associations with medical visits.

While initial testing showed promising results, further research is needed to validate the effectiveness of AR distraction in a real medical setting. Testing in hospitals will provide insights into engagement under real-world conditions, the influence of external stressors, and practical integration into clinical workflows. Additionally, long-term engagement strategies, such as theme variations or gamification, should be explored to ensure engagement for frequent hospital visitors.

This research project created a tool designed to empower "brussen", the siblings of children with special needs, aged 7 to 12 to improve their visibility and recognition among their peers through play. Often overlooked within their families due to the primary focus on their siblings' needs, brussen face unique challenges regardless of the type of special need. They can find recognition and support in each other, but the term "brussen" is not widely known, complicating their ability to connect with peers. This project adopts a participatory design and research-through-design approach, engaging brussen in co-design sessions to ensure their perspectives shape the final outcome.

The research highlights the importance of visibility among brussen, with empowerment and play emerging as key elements within the design process. The design activities themselves contribute to knowledge generation, which helps to better understand the complex context of brussen. The project developed a personalized "ByBrus backpack" with velcro buttons, allowing brussen to express their identities and control their visibility in a playful manner. This personalization provides a sense of ownership and autonomy, as the buttons symbolize the unique stories, emotions, and experiences of the brussen. Through this approach, brussen can show their unique experiences, ultimately enhancing their visibility. By addressing the need for social recognition and support, the ByBrus backpack aims to create a sense of community and mutual understanding among brussen, contributing to their overall well-being and resilience.

This project addresses a critical need in palliative care by developing a product that supports children in coping with the loss of a parent. Specifically targeting families with young children, it seeks to provide emotional support during the challenging times of a parent's serious illness and eventual passing, fostering family bonding and memory-making through engaging activities. The primary objective is to help parents and children support each other by creating and sharing personal stories. Through play and storytelling, the project aims to help families build a re-tellable, constant story that can serve as a source of comfort and continuity throughout the grieving process.

The research phase uncovered several critical insights. First, parents often struggle to talk to their children about the illness due to uncertainty about what to say and how to start the conversation. Open communication in age-appropriate chunks is essential for helping children process their feelings. Second, children and parents may feel lonely and isolated during this period. Maintaining family bonds and a sense of support is crucial. Third, children express complex emotions through play rather than words. Providing a safe space for this expression is vital for their coping process. Fourth, children need honesty about the situation to start making sense of their experiences. Encouraging questions and honest answers helps them find meaning. Finally, close physical presence and comfort are necessary for children to feel secure and supported.

The final product, "Treasured Moments," is designed to help families create and preserve memories together. It not only provides tangible records of memories but also creates a lasting legacy that can help children and their families cope with loss through shared storytelling and play. It aims to use the power of personal connection in the face of grief, offering a flexible approach to support families during one of the most challenging times in their lives.

Initial tests demonstrated that the product effectively facilitates family bonding and memory-making. The family was able to engage with the product independently, filling the memory tiles with personal items and stories that held significance for them.
The positive feedback and interest from KIEZO in taking the product forward indicate its potential impact and relevance in the field of palliative care.

Visits to the pediatric outpatient clinic are often accompanied by stress and anxiety, not only in the child but also within the parents. Within current trends in healthcare, parents are becoming more and more involved in the treatment of their child. The Hospital Hero Foundation, that already developed an app to reduce hospital related fear and anxiety in children, therefore showed interest in the question of how to support parents with this more engaged role.

IMPORTANCE OF PARENTAL SUPPORT
Literature showed that outside of the hospital context, when healthcare professionals are not present, children depend on their parents to provide the needed support. Also, during the outpatient visit parents play a very important role: children tend to look at their parents in stressful situations to determine an appropriate response. For parents to be able to execute existing strategies to reduce stress in their child, they need to possess the necessary knowledge and skills. More importantly, parents need to be able to manage their own stress, to not transmit this stress onto their child.

CHALLENGS OF PARENTS
Observations in pediatric outpatient clinics and interviews with parents and healthcare professionals confirmed and added to the previously described findings. According to this research, parents would ideally be honest, calm and radiate trust when supporting their child. The outpatient trajectory of their child, though, comes with an increase in (perceived) responsibilities of the parent possibly causing parents to be stressed. In this context, parents are generally fully focused on their child, making them unaware of their own increasing stress levels. Challenges parents experience in the context of the pediatric outpatient trajectory of their child are (1) Engaging with their social environment, (2) Gaining information, (3) Taking care of oneself, (4) Seeing their child in pain, (5) Supporting their child and (6) Working together with healthcare professionals. Support mechanisms to help parents deal with these challenges are limited and often not received by parents.

MANAGING PARENTAL STRESS
To manage parental stress, an intervention that supports parents of pediatric patients (aged 4-10 years old) with their challenges in the context of outpatient visits was designed. The focus thereby was to help parents to take care of themselves. Several brainstorming activities were executed in the ideation phase. The created bulk of ideas converged into 3 concepts, which were compared based on insights gained in this project and interviews with stakeholders. The most favorable concept was further developed into the Final Concept: the Care Companion app.

THE CARE COMPANION APP
The Care Companion app is a standalone app offered to parents by the Hospital Hero Foundation. It offers parents both affirmations as well as general tips for situations and challenges they can possibly encounter in the outpatient trajectory of their child. Each tip consists of advice from an expert and an experience from another parent. The provided tips can be read, saved and shared. A short evaluation with parents and an expert showed promising results for the concept of the Care Companion app.

Strong intergenerational relationships can provide emotional support and stability for both grandparents and grandchildren. Technology tools have been proven to be beneficial in connecting grandchildren and grandparents. Prior work mainly examined how to use technology to connect children and their grandparents over a distance. Those collocated grandparents and grandchildren who keep regular physical contact are often neglected in the research.It is essential to understand technology’s potential in bonding them in physical meet ups considering the trending of multigenerational families.

This graduation project aims to foster connectedness between children aged 8 to 12 and their collocated grandparents in the Netherlands through physical interactions. Adopting a holistic approach, we explored moments of togetherness, identifying desired qualities of these interactions and defining promising shared experiences for the future.

The research involves three phases of empirical investigations. This research begins by examining how technology could positively impact their bond. Using participatory cards during interviews, this phase captures participants' perspectives, employing mixed methods including sentiment analysis, group clustering, and thematic coding to identify key elements in shared activities that promote or impede intergenerational connectivity. This analysis informs a framework to guide the development of technology aimed at supporting connectivity. Next, the second phase, insights from two design workshops are synthesized into a series of design concepts, which are then visualized through storyboards. The final phase involves evaluating these concepts by presenting the storyboards to both experts and child-grandparent pairs. This step is intended to refine our understanding of how these technological solutions can be leveraged to strengthen family bonds.

Children with disabilities (CwD) experience many barriers decreasing their quality of life and hindering their development. Child therapists support CwD and parents of children with disabilities (PCwD) to participate in daily activities. However, the child therapists indicated to be missing the practical tools to also facilitate inclusive outdoor play. For this reason, the HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht (HU) set up the Samen spelen project. The Samen spelen project found that PCwD and parents of children with typical development (PCwTD) play a role in the barriers CwD experience as there is a knowledge gap between them. This thesis was set up in collaboration with the HU to further explore the knowledge gap and the role increased parental contact can play in decreasing the barriers CwD experience.
It was found that PCwTD rarely come into contact with CwD and therefore lack the knowledge and skills to treat CwD properly and teach children with typical development (CwTD) about CwD. Additionally, mainly the differences between CwTD and CwD are perceived, preventing the normalisation of CwD.
Based on these findings, the design vision is formulated. The vision focuses on stimulating direct contact between CwD, PCwD, CwTD and PCwTD by guiding the parents to provide input for inclusive play. Followed by stimulating PCwD to help PCwTD correct the children during inclusive play and highlighting the similarities between the children.
Based on this vision, de Voelvlek is designed. The Voelvlek consists of a sensory rug, abstractly shaped balls called ‘monstertjes’ and play cards. The monstertjes are dynamic objects that stimulate spontaneous interaction between PCwD and PCwTD and stimulate bystanders to join the play. The parents can mix and match the play cards to facilitate inclusive play ideas for their children. By discussing the common interests of the children for the play, PCwTD learn about the similarities between CwD and CwTD. When the children are playing the PCwTD can continue this learning process through observation and the questions on the play cards. The play cards use different kinds of questions to stimulate parental interaction and help PCwTD reflect on their behaviour towards CwD and PCwTD.

This graduation project explores the social-emotional context of inclusive outdoor play. The objective is to enhance participation in outdoor play for children with disabilities by focusing on inclusion. To achieve inclusion in play, the needs of all users in an outdoor play area must be addressed. This project examines themes and elements that facilitate small contact between children with and without disabilities, aiming to increase participation in outdoor play.

Context
There is a recognised need to promote outdoor play among children with disabilities, as it has a positive effect only impacts their physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development. However, children with disabilities engage in outdoor play less frequently than typically developing children, because of various barriers they experience.

Collaboration with ‘Samen Spelen??’
This project involves a close collaboration with the client ‘Samen Spelen??’. The multiprofessional team from the consortium ‘Samen Spelen??’ at ‘Hogeschool Utrecht’ are developing two toolkits for child therapists to facilitate inclusive outdoor play for children with physical disabilities (4-12 years old) and their parents. One toolkit focuses on the physical context, the other on the social context.

Research approach
To explore the social-emotional context, several research and design activities were conducted: starting with literature research and attending inclusive play activities. This was followed by participation in two generative sessions with children and an interview with an orthopedagogue to gain more insights into the emotional context.

3 found main themes
The findings from these activities led to three overarching main themes that have an influence on the social-emotional context of inclusive outdoor play. These themes formed the basis of three conclusion posters. The 3 themes and their related posters:
Theme 1: ‘The environment: people and place’
Poster 1: ’Influence of the environment and bystanders on outdoor play and making contact’
Theme 2: ‘Inclusive outdoor play activities’
Poster 2: ‘Influence of the activity on participation and making contact’
Theme 3: ‘Children’s inner world’
Poster 3: ‘Connection & experiences of a child with a disability’
 
Small contact & Design goal
The principle ‘Small contact’, identified on the third conclusion poster, was selected as the main focus of this project. Small contact refers to safe, accessible, and natural contact, without the need for full play. The facilitation of small contact creates openness to explore contact with others and children’s own ways of participating.

To grasp the focus in one sentence, a design goal is created:
'My design goal is to facilitate/create small equal contact between children with disabilities and children without disabilities that do not know each other, at an outside play area in their neighbourhood, which positively influences the participation of children with a disability'

Insights and conclusions
Based on this design goal, various brainstorming cycles were conducted, resulting in three concepts:
‘Kijk Kameraden’, ‘Spelen met Schaduw’ and ‘Stoepkrijt Ontdekking’. ‘Kijk Kameraden’ focuses on making (eye) contact through the use of reflections and mirrors. With ‘Spelen met Schaduw’ children can play by creating shadows and reacting to the shadows created by others. ‘Stoepkrijt Ontdekking’ encourages children to leave traces in the neighbourhood that help them and others to get to know the area, play opportunities and each other.

Testing prototypes of these concepts with children in context provided insights into themes and elements that facilitate small contact between children. These themes are:
1.Indirect intimate contact: Indirect direct contact through objects by exploring one of the senses: seeing
2.Indirect interplay: Indirect play through objects that can be manipulated from a small distance
3.Intermingled play: Intermingled play among children using the same objects
4.Leaving and following traces: Indirect contact through traces that indicate the visibility of other children’s play in the neighbourhood
These themes and their corresponding elements are presented in the poster ‘Small contact’.

The results can be utilised by ‘Samen Spelen??’ to develop their toolkits. The use of these results can help encourage child therapists to stimulate children with physical disabilities to make small contact with new children, without the need for adult facilitation of play activities and making contact.

This project focuses on supporting bicultural children, ages 9-12, in navigating the early stages of cultural identity development. The goal is to help them preserve cultural pride and ease the experience of the "first wall," a critical phase where children begin to question their cultural identity. The process began with a literature review to explore the challenges of bicultural identity, followed by interviews with bicultural individuals to gain deeper insights. These findings informed the development of a user scenario highlighting the "first wall."

An analysis of existing products related to cultural identity was conducted, leading to the refinement of the project scope and the definition of a clear design goal. Workshops with primary school children were conducted to test concepts in both home and school settings, focusing on fostering cultural heritage preservation, empathy cultivation, and emotional reflection. Ideation sessions and testing informed the development of a final three-phase workshop toolkit designed for both environments. The toolkit encourages personal reflection at home and collective engagement at school, with tools like prompt cards, cultural activity photography, and interactive storytelling.

The project concludes with an evaluation of the toolkit's effectiveness and recommendations for future development, including enhancing AI capabilities and expanding community involvement to strengthen cultural engagement.

Outdoor play among children of the new generations is shifting, and not necessarily for the better. A considerable number of kids are missing out on spending their free time outdoors, and those who do engage often lack diversity. For instance, in the Netherlands, only about one-third of children playing outdoors are girls. These observations have prompted numerous studies aimed at observing and understanding children’s play behaviors and preferences in outdoor environments. However, these studies often overlook an important group – the children who are not outside.
This graduation project focuses on children aged 8 to 11 who are currently less engaged in outdoor play. A specific approach is used in analyzing children’s play preferences, which is to examine the link that exists between outdoor play and their personalities.
The project involves several research activities: literature research on outdoor play and personality models, consultation of experts, direct observations of children, and contextmapping sessions with outdoor play stakeholders. By combining the results of the research, a design framework for outdoor play emerges. The framework features five distinct characters, each representing a different type of child who is often overlooked when designing outdoor play spaces.
Leveraging this framework, a series of design concepts is developed to cater to these five character profiles. These concepts are presented in a booklet, which aims to inspire designers, urban planners, and decision-makers in the field of outdoor play to create more inclusive and engaging play environments for all children.

This report delves into the challenging process of translating complex tests from the Child Brain Lab into a design that is both accessible and engaging for children. The Child Brain Lab, part of the Erasmus MC Sophia Children’s Hospital, conducts research on brain development to gain a better understanding of the course of brain disorders and improve treatments for children with brain disorders. In return for children’s participation in the lab, the hospital aims to provide them with a child-friendly patient dossier: The Self-portrait. The goal of this project is:

To design a digital solution that translates the results from a selection of tests that are performed in the Child Brain Lab, into a meaningful contribution for children (developmental age 6-12 years old) with brain disorders, that will increase their participation in their care path, and positively support their developing self-image.

To design a solution that caters to the needs of the child patients, first the problem space was explored, through literature research and interviews with stakeholders. Within the age range of the target audience, children develop their language skills and transition from imaginative thinking to more logical reasoning. These cognitive abilities influence the formation of their self-image, which led to the framework for contributing to self-image: ‘Look what I did’ - ‘Look how I did it’ - ‘Look how I did it and what I learned from it.’ This framework was used to adapt the app to the needs of the target audience. In addition, the participants’ brain disorders present additional challenges, such as poor eyesight and a need for predictability.

The tests for which a translation is being made in the app are the EEG, IQ test, and walking mat. Each of these tests comes with its own set of challenges. For example, the data from the EEG test is complex and elusive for children, and the analysis is quite intricate for physicians. The results of the IQ test are highly valued.
The discovery phase revealed five trade-offs, such as the balance between providing honest information or protecting a child by sharing only positive information. The insights led to the design goal:

Create a personally rewarding visualization of the test-data of the EEG, IQ-test and walking mat for each child that visits the CBL, by highlighting their personal achievements and empowering children to become aware of and accept who they are, in a form that is integrated in the clinical workflow of the Pediatric Brain Centre, and supportive during the full care journey, so that HCPs see the Self-portrait as an enrichment to their work.

The result is an interactive prototype of The Self-portrait, inviting children to explore the world of their own brains. Each test is developed with its own character. For instance in the case of the walking mat, animals are used to give children insights into their walking patterns, envisioning enriched dialogues between children and physiotherapists, potentially leading to improvements.

Throughout the app’s development, all stakeholders have been involved multiple times, ensuring the right balance is struck in the design between presenting accurate information aligned with clinical practice while also appealing to children.

Through this endeavor, the project aims to bridge the gap between complex medical data and child-friendly interpretations, fostering a better understanding and engagement with one’s health metrics.

The Child Brain Lab (CBL), a part of the Paediatric Brain Centre at Sophia Children’s Hospital within the Erasmus Medical Centre, is a scientific research and testing facility dedicated to children with brain conditions (CB). These children frequently experience isolation and lack of social contact due to their situations. These observations lead to the following research question, “How can design empower participants aged six to eighteen in the Child Brain Lab to use peer-sharing for preparation and support during their visits effectively?”

As CB frequently visit the hospital and are familiar with the medical setting, a CBL visit does not trigger much stress. So, it became clear that the main challenge was not solely to reduce stress but to empower these children to share their experiences, gain control, and connect with their peers. The CBL provided an ideal opportunity to address these needs as it aims to test hundreds of CB annually. CB did express a desire to be informed about procedures and often felt alone during hospital visits.

Several key findings were established from this research. Firstly, it became clear that children with brain conditions (CB) have unique knowledge from their personal experiences and are therefore experts in the area of their condition. Secondly, these children have a strong desire to help others and to learn new things. In addition, a number of barriers were recognised that CB often face, including limited information and empathy that does not meet their needs. To address these challenges, the approach focuses on creating a safe and supportive environment for peer interaction, bridging information gaps and simplifying complex medical language, by equal communication.

As a result, the design goal is to empower participants of the CBL to recognise their expertise and support them to express their experiences and share them with their peers.

These findings led to Lab Maatjes, a peer-sharing app tailored to the CBL journey. It was designed around the principles of self-determination theory. For autonomy, the app allows users to explore what CBL involves and why it is important. It also offers guidance and support to navigate the app and express themselves independently. It promotes competence by allowing them to share their stories, feel heard and seen, and gather the information they want to know. Finally, it provides relatedness by creating a trusted environment where they can connect with peers and gain insight into their experiences and how they relate to their views. Lab Maatjes creates an engaging preparation process that puts participants in control, makes them feel valued for their contributions to the CBL and ensures that they do not feel alone as they connect with peers.

This thesis concludes with an evaluation of the app, using the feedback of the CBL participants for quick iterations. The final sections of this report identify areas for improvement and recommendations for implementing the design, including creating two versions of the app for different age groups, implementing advanced features such as audio recording, and doing more research on the sharing behaviours of the participants.

This project is in collaboration with the Green Kids’ Museum Kenya, which will be the first interactive children museum in East Africa. The museum will become a place for children of age 6 to 14 to learn, inspire and explore, with sustainability at its core.

The purpose of the project is to propose an interactive design to playfully foster awareness around renewable energy at the Green Kids' Museum Kenya, in specific for children aged 9 to 11 living in the Nairobi metropolitan area.

An effective and engaging way to educate children is by providing a play-based learning experience as it capitalises on the motivational abilities and engagement of play. In order to provide such an experience the target group first needs to be triggered to engage with the installation. Once the children are interested in the installation they need to be able to playfully explore, experiment and reflect on the implementation of renewable energy. After which the children will leave the installation with a sense of pride, due to the gained learning experience.

To support the play-based learning journey and to ensure that an exhibition is engaging for children, 12 guidelines have been developed, based on a creative session with children, interviews with stakeholders, museum visits and literature review. Each guideline corresponds with an underlying need of children: support children with different interests, give children the feeling that they are in control, allow children to take a break to reflect on their experience, enable discovery, emphasise the feeling of fellowship, challenge the abilities of the children, provide a clear and simple introduction, allow children to take risks, trigger their senses, reflect everyday life within the installation, utilise humour and create an aesthetically pleasing experience.

The guidelines formed the basis for developing the design Geotricity. Geotricity consists of a table with an interactive landscape projected on it. The challenge for the children is to provide energy to the houses on the table. To accomplish this, the children can place elements that represent renewable energy power plants. Placing an element causes the projection to change accordingly. If a power plant is placed in a correct position, the lights in the corresponding houses are turned on. Through exploration, experimentation and reflection the child will learn about the implementation of the different renewable energy power plants.

Based on an evaluation test with Dutch children at the age of 10, it appears that the concept is experienced as engaging and provides children the opportunity to playfully explore and experiment with the applicability of power plants. Once they properly positioned an element and made a house light up, the children felt a sense of pride.

Further research needs to be conducted to establish if the design has the same impact on the target group of children aged 9 to 11 living in the Nairobi metropolitan area and to determine whether the experience has the desired educational impact.

This report describes the process of designing a shared family experience for Kunstmuseum Den Haag that encourages visitors to explore and discuss the personal art experience together.

Kunstmuseum Den Haag is an art museum with a large variation of art pieces. They would like to see more families visiting the museum.
Their vision is ‘Getting closer to art’, meaning they wish to offer visitors a personal connection with art.

The personal art experience is anything someone thinks, feels or perceives about art that is unique to that person. It is interesting to help families explore and discuss this experience, because children might have trouble identifying them and have trouble putting them into words. In turn, adults might underestimate their children and never try, or they don’t know how to talk about it.
By discussing the experience, you can not only learn about art, but more about yourself and your family members as well.

To have a shared experience that successfully enhanced the personal experience, it is important that all family members are equally engaged. During this project, I identified four design principles of creating engagement in museums and four ways towards enhancing the personal art experience.

The four ways to engagement are:
- Role-play and autonomy
- Anticipation and reward
- Appropriate novelty and challenge
- Facilitation of varied energy levels

The four ways to enhancing the personal experience are:
- Pushing and challenging behaviour
- Novelty and weirdness
- Asking the right questions
- Relatability to one’s own life

The final product consists of six role-booklets that each use different questions and exercises to explore and discuss the personal art experience. With the roles, one can move, be creative, search for details, experiment physically, fantasize, fabricate, change, feel and share opinions. Every player answers one question per artwork.
Additional to these booklets, there is the wayfinding board. The wayfinding boards helps with choosing an artwork to explore and discuss with your family. The family is still in charge of choosing their own artworks, but they are challenged to choose art they might otherwise not. It also makes for variation in activities during the interaction.
With this game, families are able to direct their own visit, but be supported in their journey toward a more personal experience.

This report describes the development of the tool PREQUEL, a tangible storytelling tool to build a family culture. The tool is intended to support meaningful conversations between two parents. Through conversation and storytelling, the tool encourages them to explore the world of parenting and everything that comes with that.

Parenting always comes with challenges. However, intercultural parents experience added stressors. Being raised in different cultural groups, intercultural parents will probably hold diverse values, beliefs, and attitudes. The more opposing the values are, the greater the likelihood of the parents encountering problems. Values translate into practices which are particular ways of doing something. The challenge for these parents is to reconcile different childrearing practices that have these contradictory aims and goals.

The goal that guided the project is “to support new intercultural parents, in the safe context of their home, in building a family culture that both can rely on and are comfortable with by teaching them to reflect and communicate so that they can create a stable and consistent environment for themselves and their child(ren)”.

PREQUEL is based on a framework comprising of six steps: awareness, understanding, evaluation, appreciation, adjustment, and execution. The framework is a way for parents to work through their experiences and evaluate their behaviour. They are supported in going through the steps, which concludes with them planning how to approach future parenting situations. They do this by identifying shared values and use them as a strength in their daily lives. This will lead to both parents and child(ren) being able to cherish the richness that sharing multiple cultures can bring.

Yearly, roughly 350.000 child hospitalizations take place in the Netherlands and 27% of Dutch children had a chronic disease in 2019, varying from frequently occurring diagnoses like asthma to rare and progressive diseases. However, the life expectancy for children who suffer from a chronic illness continues to increase considerably. This results in a focus on long-term effects of disease and the quality of life for diagnosed children (Van de Putte, E. M., & Van der Ent, C. K., 2019).This project is a collaboration with the Wilhelmina Children’s hospital in Utrecht. In this thesis, the meaning of wellbeing in a pediatric hospital is explored and defined through literature studies and generative sessions with patients, family members and staff in the WKZ. The aim was to implement the insights from the research in a redesign for the activity room in the hospital. The design goal derived from the research outcomes was to give patients of the Wilhelmina Children’s hospital the tools and empowerment to create control over their environment and autonomy over their activities in the hospital, which will be enhanced by stimulation of social involvement among patients within the hospital. Using a participatory approach, patients and former patients of the WKZ were involved in concept development through an idea generation session. Two initial concepts were tested in the WKZ, which led to the establishment of the final concept. The final concept is a spatial design for the activity room focused on the free, independent exploration and play of children. The design gives children the opportunity to control their own playing environment with geometric lightweight blocks or to find a place of their own in cavities in the wall. It stimulates social interaction among children through a semi-transparent playing wall and allows them to express and leave their personal creativity. The results from the final concept test in the WKZ were used to establish a Vision for future designers who work in a similar context. In this vision, the insights from the research and testing sessions of this project are stated as design opportunities with possible solution areas that can improve patient wellbeing in a pediatric hospital.

Sustainable Rural Initiatives (SRI) is a non-profit organisation in Okana, a rural community in West Kenya. SRI provides the community members of Okana with opportunities to develop practical skills such as carpentry and tailoring. SRI also works with international partners with specific expertise to give local community members opportunities to develop skills they would otherwise not have had. In all these efforts, there is a strong focus on reflecting the culture, surroundings, and values of the community. Play is an important aspect of how children develop and make sense of their surroundings. Toys are tools through which play is facilitated, but making toys itself is a common form of play too. The literature on play suggests that by providing kids with joyful, engaging, iterative and socially interactive play experiences, adults can guide children’s play to help children develop skills directly involved with that play experience, but also more general learning-to-learn skills. My project had two goals; the first was to give children the opportunity to develop design skills in a fun and playful way. Design is an exciting medium for kids to develop several valuable design skills, that are broadly applicable. The second was to give SRI the tools and practical knowledge to provide children with design activities through which they can develop those skills, both now and in the future. To reach these goals I designed a toolkit, consisting of a manual and several videos, that allows SRI to organise playful design workshops for kids to help the children develop these design skills. In the workshops, the children design toys from materials such as clay and wood, that are available around SRI’s community centre. In the workshops the design process is structured in three phases. In the first phase, a topic is introduced through a video, that then poses several questions to help the kids discuss that topic. These discussions help them to make their goal concrete, as they practise working together. In the second phase they build and test their idea. The kids first gather materials, and then use those materials to prototype their toy. They practise making their ideas tangible and learn from making mistakes. Finally they present their designs to each other, allowing the others to ask questions and give feedback. In doing so, they practise their communication skills and their capacity to reflect. From the third workshop onward, the facilitator has to introduce the topic and questions to the children himself, replacing the video. The facilitator can find suggestions for topics and stories in the manual to help him come up with other challenges for the kids. This toolkit gives children in Okana a fun pastime through which they are introduced to the design process, and can develop valuable design skills. This toolkit has given SRI the knowledge and tools to host those workshops. It has also given SRI a model they can use to effectively transfer knowledge from external partners to the local community.

Project goal

The goal of this project is to design an immersive interactive experience inside an electric truck for Museon for pop-up locations at schools aimed at preteenagers to inspire, activate, and make them care about nature and sustainability. The experience should be made accessible to children from disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

The project consists of 2 phases, a research phase and design phase.

Research phase

During the research phase, two user research has been done. The first a context mapping session is done to understand how preteenagers perceive sustainability. It was discovered that their focus is mostly on nature, and they know the basic principles if a behaviour is good or bad for the environment. Often when asked for reasoning it is missing or wrong. The second were expert interviews, with the goal to learn more about how to design for children in the museum setting. Museum educators at Museon were interviewed. Information transfer is important when designing for children, they should enjoy the experience and therefor the experience should be designed to fit their identity needs. A design framework consisting of design principles, personas, design goal, interaction vision, and creative vision has been made using the information of the user research.

Literature research has been conducted to understand how to educate children about sustainability. According to Janssen et al. (2019) an approach to educate children about wicked problems is providing them with the perspectives of different stakeholders which should improve their systematic thinking and is necessary to solve complex issues. Literature research also has been done to better understand how to design for museum experiences. According to Bär and Boshouwers (2018) it is essential to design a story which the visitors can go through. The 9 experience journey steps have been adopted as blueprints for the final design to create a good story.

Design phase

The second phase is the design phase, creative sessions has been done to design a theme, exhibits, camper layout, and thematic objects. The final concept is a campervan experience in which the visitors make a journey along the Rijn. The camper is relevant to preteenagers as it reminds them of holiday and adventure. The experience consists of introductions using iconic objects of traveling to immerse the visitor, exhibits designed to fit the identity needs of the different personas to make the experience enjoyable, and an educational message with the educational approach of Janssen et al. (2019) where the children make sustainable choices after every exhibit and revealing how this affected their environment in the end of the experience.

The design phase ends with an evaluation done with preteenagers visiting Museon. A paper prototype has been used to walk the visitors through the exhibition and using the PrEmo tool (2007) as a discussion tool to understand how they feel about the exhibits. The exhibits were rated positive, and the educational message was seen as insightful for the children. Making their own choices and seeing how it effects the environment made it easy to understand the bigger system connected to the chosen sustainable behaviour.

The aim of this thesis was to design an ‘Episode Builder’ toolkit which facilitates filmmakers to easily create a wide variety of episodes that all contain at least one educational response moment for 1.5-3-years-olds while meeting parents’ concerns. Additionally, four different response moments were designed which trigger the child to actively engage with the content. These response moments were integrated within the toolkit’s concept.

During the analysis phase, extensive literature studies and an interview with a pedagogue resulted in an overview of context-dependent design opportunities and threats that would affect the educational value of watching television, spread over the six core elements of the framework. Context mapping research with Dutch families found that it was most common that parents let their toddler watch TV when the parent requires his full attention on another activity during the day. However, parents are bothered that their child wasn’t actively thinking about the presented content on television. Therefore, a design goal, an interaction vision and 18 design guidelines were formulated for creating educational and actively engaging episodes, which resulted in the design of four different response moments which a toddler can safely perform without the parent’s supervision.

When evaluating Pixifox Animation’s first storyboards, it was found that filmmakers integrated too many features within their storyboards which are too complicated for the viewer. Two design principles were formulated in which the toolkit should 1) facilitate filmmakers to explore essential features around a central theme, and integrate these features within their storyboard, and 2) fit the filmmaker’s creative process. These design guidelines, and the integration of the response moments, resulted in the toolkit’s final concept, consisting of five templates.

A validation study with 6 participants was set up to clarify whether the toolkit is able to facilitate filmmakers to create a great variety of educational storyboards around different central themes. In pairs of two, participants worked with five laminated paper templates to create an educational storyboard containing one response moment around a chosen theme.

The Episode Builder found to be able to facilitate filmmakers to create various educational storyboards which all include one response moment around different central themes. Participants had a clear idea about what the story’s essence and learning goal should be, which a toddler can comprehend. However, some educational value was lost, since the toolkit failed to facilitate the participants to translate these features into visual shots which aren’t overwhelming for the viewer. The activity was reviewed as insightful, probably easy to use after the first use, and somewhat repetitive.
Future tests should involve participants who are willing to the toolkit several times for four hours to validate if a 3-5 minute storyboard can be created within this timeframe and gain insight which types of themes can be explored with the toolkit.

Design explorations are recommended about how the toolkit can be introduced more efficiently, be more efficient in use when creativity isn’t required, and how parent and child could reflect on the episode’s content in other activities to elevate the educational value.

Children's participation in society is still limited without the establishment of appropriate areas, and the possibility to access the spheres of urban activism, children risks to remain invisible citizens. While children don't get the chance to unleash their creative talents in the innovation playground society is turning into, society lacks their contribution as playful and constructive disorganizers of the world. Based on those background premises, the current project focuses on exploring how children can participate in society without a top-down involvement and how they can be supported in the process of empowerment as active agents in their social and urban context. The opportunity for the project inquiry was found in collaboration with a children center in the outskirt of Bari (Italy), a frontrunner of the Urban civic networks project aimed at promoting urban and human regeneration in a neglected context, where the sense of powerlessness over positive transformations is handed down to children. A research through design approach was utilized to achieve the project goal: design a tool that enables 6 to 12 years old children to undertake an activation journey to take action towards prosocial challenges meaningful for themselves and their community. In the initial research cycle, desk research and comparative analysis of 6 different case studies of toolkit and programs were performed to unveil how children's empowerment could be supported by design. The resulting map of ideal empowering strategies allowed to identify some pillars of children activation process to inform the following cycles. Among those, the community perception, the unlocking of I can mindset and opportunities for action were the object of the research through design interventions, together with the open endedness of the activation process disclosed along with the two iterations. The insights collected converged into children's intuitive, creative activation journey, including gaps, enablers, and needs they experienced along it. They also contributed to enriching the requirements list for the tool's design. During the ideation the leading research outcomes were embodied in the final tool proposal "Il Priscio", activities set for young positive change-makers, that propose them a child-led activation through 5 main steps: raising I can, finding relevance in opportunities for change, becoming protagonists, powers-driven ideation and practicing courage. The tool suitcase board contains 14 activity cards with open-ended steps to perform and additional materials to support the experience, such as a platform to practice courage by sharing the results of the powers-driven ideation. The partial test of the tool in the context of the Urban civic network, set up as a third design intervention, acted as a launchpad for children self-activation. Although the implementation in the context of civic associations is envisioned, the tool opened up further research direction about children's self-esteem, the communicative potential of their imaginative interventions, constructive communication with policymakers, and the addition of levels of ambiguity to the tool journey.