This thesis presents the design and validation of a low-cost, classroom-ready testing setup developed for the Understanding Product Engineering (UPE) course at TU Delft. While the course introduces first-year design students to material properties, limited access to hands-on testing has left key concepts like stiffness abstract and difficult to grasp. The project responds to this gap by creating a dual-purpose setup that supports both intuitive material exploration and structured mechanical testing.

Through iterative research and prototyping, a final design was developed: a compact three-point bending device with integrated force and deflection measurement, complemented by tactile tools for informal property investigation. Educational alignment was achieved by incorporating principles of Productive Failure and experiential learning, allowing students to confront their assumptions and engage with real-world variation in material behavior.

User testing showed increased student confidence and understanding of material stiffness, while mechanical evaluation confirmed measurement repeatability within a ±11.3% error margin and ~6% standard deviation across trials. The setup is now ready for integration into the UPE course and demonstrates potential for broader application in design education.

This project aims to introduce engineering in a way that captures students' interest. In order to motivate studernts to try it out, instead of limited by their past experience. Therefore, expanding the original knowledge of engineering during the design ideation process becomes crucial. Beginning with the identification of factors contributing to the underrepresentation of female students in the field. Additionally, this study collaborates with Cities of Things Lab 010, which strives to incorporate citizens' opinions into the neighbourhood robot design process. Hosting the workshop and making robot development accessible to all citizens. For me, I narrowed down the scope to focus on students.

To address the research questions, I conducted a literature review and identified two gaps: limited research on gender learning in STEM for ages above 18 and a scarcity of studies on the male perspective. I conducted surveys to address these gaps. One focused on the educational robotics toolkit, utilizing experiences of female Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) bachelor students (aged 18 to 21).

The other survey aimed to understand the male perspective on the current situation in the engineering field. Involving both males and females in crafting the solution creates awareness of the responsibility that everyone plays a role in this situation. It is crucial to emphasize that this thesis does not aim to generate conflict between genders. Instead, its message has the ambition of shaping a world where everyone can choose what they want to do based on their interests, free from gender stereotypes. Furthermore, I defined the design goal of the toolkit based on this message.

The design goal of the toolkit is to make everyone feel involved and comfortable to share their opinion in the group discussion. Encouraging the incorporation of different viewpoints and getting inspired by other people’s ideas. Ultimately, broadens the existing original impression of robotics. To visualise the design goal and validate the final concept, I developed a prototype of an inspirational toolkit with fellow students mainly from the DP3 course in the IDE bachelor program. Since the group assignment of the DP3 course is to design a cleaning robot for the campus. Utilising this toolkit to inspire students in the early stages of robot design can have a positive impact on the design process. I conducted multiple user testings to improve the prototype, considering the interplay of aesthetics, form, user experience and assembly.

Final design HiveMind, I conducted user testing with a group of students to validate whether the after-use effect of the prototype aligns with the design goal. All participants agreed that they feel encouraged and comfortable expressing their ideas, and the toolkit helps them get on the same page. Furthermore, the toolkit improves group discussions in the early stages of the design process, especially when everyone in the group is not familiar with each other. The validation result shows that each participant has a more diverse impression of robots after using the toolkit. However, I observed that the shape of the robot they drew for the assignment still adheres to a traditional representation of how a robot should be. This suggests that future design recommendations could focus on the relationship between picture cognitive association, the impact of different game rules, and using the toolkit before or after hands-on activities.

Computer numerical control (CNC) routers, mills and lasers have enabled engineers, designers and hobbyists to create various complex forms and designs through the process of subtractive manufacturing. Whereas CNC-routers and -lasers are generally used to machine flat 2D shapes out of stock sheets of various kinds of materials, CNC mills are used to create full 3D designs. Even though the machines are capable of creating very intricate and detailed parts, the machines themselves are very large and rigid contraptions. Owning a CNC machine often involves making the decision of either giving up a large amount of workspace, simply to be able to house the machine itself and manufacture large parts. Or saving space by choosing a desktop style CNC machine which comes at the cost of a smaller build area and lesser capabilities.
In order to allow the user to not have to choose between workspace or build area the following design statement was created;

Designing a ‘one size fits all’ resizable CNC router to enable designers, engineers and hobbyists to manufacture (large) parts without the need to compromise valuable workspace. Providing true flexibility to the user in terms of work- and build area.

This design statement laid the foundation for the entire project. In order to fulfil the statement, a resizable CNC router was designed and a fully functional prototype was created.

The concept of this resizable router was achieved by taking a closer look at existing solutions and machines as well as the different users and contexts in which the machines operate, in order to gain a better understanding and derive requirements for the design.
The process taken during the project could be categorized into three different phases; The Research/Analysis Phase, The Idea Generation Phase and the Embodiment/Materialisation Phase. A number of fitting design tools, techniques and methodologies have been implemented during the three different phases of the project. Respectively the most important design tools/techniques that have been implemented were;
A ‘Function Analysis’ which resulted in a ‘Function Structure’ (which formed the basis for the List of Requirements), ‘The Fish Trap Model’ which was used to generate ideas and create the concept and finally the most important model used during this project was the ‘Build Measure Learn’ (BML) loop. The Build Measure Learn loop was kept in mind during the entire process of this project, it describes a process of prototyping, evaluating and reiterating in order to create functional and valuable prototypes in a fast-paced manner.

With the help of the previously mentioned design tools, methods and techniques a design was realized for a resizable CNC router. This design was supported and evaluated with the help of the creation of a fully functional prototype.

In the field of soft robotics, rigid joints and links are replaced by soft, deformable elements, This causes soft continuum robot arms to excel in unpredictable environments, but to face challenges during control and shape reconstruction. The sensing ability present in octopus suckers provides inspiration for solutions. Octopuses employ their suckers not only to strengthen their grasp but also as tactile sensors to control the shape and position of their soft arms. This has motivated researchers to integrate artificial sensorized suckers in soft continuum robot arms Although various sensorized suckers have already been developed, their employed sensing methods tend to be low in resolution and are often poorly embedded into the overall sucker architecture. In this work, these limits are overcome by presenting an octopus-inspired suction cup with integrated high-resolution tactile sensing abilities. This is achieved by utilizing the Chromatouch Principle, which relies on embedding colored markers in the suction cup membrane. Tracking these markers with a camera produced tactile images containing useful information about forces, deformations and interactions with objects. Fabrication with multi-material additive manufacturing enabled direct integration of these markers into the suction cup membranes. We demonstrated the design’s basic functionality by conducting pull-off and pickup tests. The design exhibited a normal pull-off force of 9.53 N and a shear pull-off force of 5.28 N. It was also able to successfully pick up both flat and curved objects. The sensing ability was showcased by training a Convolutional Neural Network to learn the relationship between the camera images and the orientation of the suction cup with respect to a touching substrate. Using a spherical coordinate system, the orientation could be predicted with an error of less than 2 degrees for latitude and less than 9 degrees for longitude. This performance was validated by using the trained network to successfully correct the orientation when picking up objects under an angle. For a single suction cup, this ability can be utilized to correct the orientation and achieve perpendicular contact with an object, crucial for achieving a seal. On a larger scale, the integration of multiple suction cups in soft continuum robot arms has the potential to form a representation of the arm shape as a whole. It can thereby contribute to overcoming the control challenges faced in the field of soft robotics.

The potential and development of mycelium based materials has been increasing over the last years. This material is proving to be a green alternative for a variety of commodity materials like plastics, wood, leather, etc because of its ability to upcycle waste streams. A lot of existing research performed is focussed on the environmental factors required for mycelium cultivation and don’t look beyond these minimal environmental conditions. This graduation project contributes to the development of mycelium based materials by looking beyond the realm of these growing requirements. In this research the effect and potential of acoustic environments on the growth of mycelium is explored according to the Material Driven Design Method by Karana et al. (2015). The goal of this project is to provide first insight into the relation between the acoustic environments and mycelial growth. First by looking into physiology of mycelium and the required growing conditions needed for effective growth of the material. Additionally the physics of sound is explored to get an understanding of the factors that define an acoustic environment. A setup was created to host the required environmental conditions needed by designing three modular incubators. These incubators provide a multifunctional growing chamber where different stimuli systems can be placed precisely within while maintaining the required growing conditions for the mycelium and dampen external sounds. Three different conditions were created for this research, a silence chamber, a mono speaker and a stereo setup to see the response of the mycelium to the different types of stimuli. The response was captured by doing a grayscale analysis to quantitatively analyse the change in growth. In this research the key findings of the research provided first insights into the negative correlation between this acoustic environment and mycelial growth regarding the growth rate and textural qualities at higher volumes. In addition it provided that this type of sonic stimuli has no effect on the textural qualities and spatial distribution of mycelium.

The research described in this thesis explores the field of 3D printing technologies in the fabrication of printed, flexible tactile sensors and explores new possibilities and opportunities in the fabrication. The research is aiming at new ways of applying 3D printing fabrication techniques to develop easily applicable sensing structures to flexible, wearable applications.

Exploration into sensing principles and sensor designs for the printed fabrication of these tactile sensors results in the main design drivers of piezoresistive sensing and capacitive sensing to act as sensing mechanism for the developed sensors.

Fabrication principles are selected according to design thinking methods, and select and evaluate the trace design, substrate selection and 3D printing technique used in defining a concept proposal.

The performed exploration and design selection result in the concept proposal of a 3D printed tactile sensor using a TPU-coated nylon fabric substrate and ink-dispensed sensing structure using a Voltera V-One 3D printer. The sensing element is embedded into the fabric using heat sealing. A scalable, adaptable sensing array is proposed to allow for embedded tactile imaging capabilities.
The developed tactile sensor is validated by analysing a characterisation of the sensor readouts. A validation setup using a loadcell and vertical load is used to allow for the plotting of the sensors’ characteristics and linearity.

Validation shows evidence of significant measurement repeatability, while showing less proof for precise accuracy and resolution. Additional work needs to improve physical durability of the traces and connections.

The research concludes in a foundation towards the use of the 3D printing technologies of ink jetting/-dispensing to develop embedded sensor to be used in a large variety of tactile sensing/imaging applications.

The thesis clarifies the graduation project for the master program of Integrated Product Design at the Delft University of Technology. It describes an interconnection method to connect electronics onto the smart textiles that differs from any solutions existing in the market. Smart textiles are considered as the future of the clothes and are predicted to have a large potential market. However, there is no standard interconnection technique that is applicable to the wide variety of smart systems. Problems on the wearability, reliability, size, comfort and cost severely limit the development of smart textile. Thus related products are still in a preliminary stage. In this thesis, it is first explored the previous work in the field of smart textiles. User research and using context analysis helps to form the design requirements. A thorough exploration of the existing interconnection techniques and wirings help to form the first ideas to start. Then it is made into several rounds of ideations. Design decisions are made based on the design goal and the list of requirements. Practical tests are set up to evaluate and compare the different concepts as well. Finally, the work of detailing, user experience design, aesthetics, manufacturing is also carefully considered and elaborated for the chosen concept. The result of this study is a product with a highly-finished level. Elitac, the corporate company, should be able to start manufacturing after the electronics are finished. From the academic aspect, this new interconnection solution gives a promising direction for the development of smart textiles. It solves the most difficult part of this field, which is the integration of electronics into the textiles. In general, the result of this thesis should be helpful to the researchers, designers and companies in this field.

Office workers who hold a static posture during prolonged computer work have the highest incidence of neck disorders. Clinical massage, as one of the main treatment methods, has been proved to be effective by many studies. The proposed idea is to record what the therapist did in the massage treatment and recreate that with the device. This project focused on the actuating system. At the end of this project, the accuracy of the recreated massage was evaluated.

The topic of this project is exploring design directions towards a smart private-bathroom service/product. It is often the case that a bathroom is used by multiple people after each other. An unclean bathroom environment can hinder the user experience. The shared bathroom also involves a peak usage issue. These two points will cause dissatisfaction among users. So, the design goal is to (1) reduce user’s effort when cleaning the bathroom and (2) assist users in using the bathroom together by a technical solution. The final output is a smart toilet lid with three interaction concepts of different smart levels. Through evaluation and analysis, I found that users with high acceptance of smart products tend to choose smart products as an “assistant”; on the contrary, users with low acceptance of smart products tend to choose “tools”. For the former, they are more concerned about what personal data is collected and they expect a balance between personal data and smart services.

The Rollz Motion is a mobility aid that can be transformed from a wheelchair to a rollator. Users of this Rollz Motion complain that it takes too much force to push the Rollz Motion as a wheelchair with a person inside. Especially users that live in hilly areas have these problems. This project tries to solve this problem through the creation of a power assisted push support system that can be attached to the Rollz Motion. This should lower the threshold of going for a walk and increase the range of environments that the users of the Rollz Motion can access.

Comfort -
As a first step the research focussed on how the users could benefit best from such a smart system. A force analysis validated the severity of the complaints and user interviews highlighted that users can develop a fear for mobility. The smart system should comfort the user by taking away this fear and it should comfort the push attendant by lowering the use force.

Support -
Some types of power assisted mobility aids have a high number of accidents. This shows that the user group is vulnerable. An analysis was done to test whether the Rollz Motion would be safe enough to motorise. Assistive supportive technology needs to be implemented in the design of the drive system to generate the necessary safety.

Perception -
Mobility aids suffer from product related stigma. This creates a threshold of going for a walk, makes users insecure and can have a negative effect on the mobility of the user. For new product development the stigma needs to be redesigned to make users proud and confident about using their product.

Prototype -
The first version of a push supportive system has been designed and prototyped. This system utilises a motor control algorithm that proved to be able to provide robust output in different contexts. It showed potential to lower the force of pushing a person in the Rollz Motion on a hill from 200N to 10N.

This thesis contains the concept of a hand held device that is able to measure and classify the stem of avenue trees in a more automated matter with the ability to process the results digital. The measure concept is based on the technique of triangulating a 2D profile by using a slit laser and camera.