This paper addresses designing for accessibility of renovated housing. The investigated case evaluates interfaces of heating and ventilation systems in a demonstration apartment for an intended renovation of high-rise social housing in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We selected a focus on people who are blind or have low vision (PBLV). We conducted two qualitative studies with different target groups, (expert) users and building domain experts, to answer two research questions: First, what are the accessibility limitations of the currently installed HVAC systems in social housing, using the example of the demo apartment? Second, in what way can we enable stakeholders aiming to commission a renovation to make decisions that improve accessibility? We argue based on interviews and remote observations that PBLV face many issues. For example, home control interfaces commonly lack features such as a voice control option or tactile buttons, making them inaccessible for this group and less accessible for everyone else. To tackle this challenge, we propose a guidebook supporting decision-makers in assessing and implementing accessibility in renovation projects of social housing. The final evaluation confirmed that such an intervention fills a gap for human-centred tools in zero-energy renovations.@en

My recently started Civic Prototyping research group aims to develop new tools and methods enabling urban residents to exploratively research and develop applications of new technologies. This allows them to improve their everyday lives by taking their own initiative in creating valuable services, prod-ucts, collaborations, and shared spaces. Facilitating applied design research is an essential part of this. But what does applied design research look like in the context of a community of people who keep trying to change the world around them? And what are the challenges for the implementation of applied design research in such a context? To answer these questions, I first need to explain my understanding ofwhat applied design research actually is.@en

Along with the urgent need to reinvent our society, a series of paradigm shifts are already shaping transitions toward a more participatory and digital society. The current work takes stock of the promise of open data as a new resource and elaborates upon the maker movement, which has spurred people’s capacity to participate and has provided tools and infrastructures to unleash people’s intrinsic ability to create and innovate. We explore how open data can be a new commons, discuss how hackathons can support digital citizenship, and reflect on the role of Transition Design in creating ecosystems around the common resource and in building capacity@en

The current work explores the participation divide that is oftentimes at play within local citizen communities. The studied case illustrates a common situation where the majority of local citizens does not participate in public space improvement and maintenance activities organised by local community activists. The presented research involved semi-structured interviews supported by interactive service design probes. It has led to two strategies for stimulating community participation, namely 1) increasing transparency around community activities, and 2) embedding community participation in citizens' daily social practices.@en

This paper investigates the opportunities of leveraging a hackathon format to empower citizens by increasing their abilities to use open data to improve their neighbourhoods and communities. The presented discussion is grounded in five civic hackathon case studies organised in five European cities. The research revealed specialised learning and collaborative alignment as two mutually complementary aspects of the involved learning processes, which were achieved with the help of high-fidelity and low-fidelity prototypes, respectively. Consequently, the paper identifies and discusses three main factors required to sustain social learning ecosystems beyond hackathon events, and with the purpose of democratising smart city services. These factors include a) supporting individuals in obtaining specific expert knowledge and skills, b) nurturing data- literate activist communities of practice made up of citizens with complementary expert skillsets, and c) enabling members of these communities to generate prototypes of open-data services of varying fidelity. @en

In this pictorial we present a project case, where an interactive offce environment was designed following a concurrent prototyping approach embedded in an iterative design process. The case illustrates how concurrent prototyping supports designing complex interactions between multiple people and multiple interactive objects, while innovating in both social and technological realm. Identifed variables of the involved process allow steering the design towards a variety of possible solution qualities. We propose this approach as a viable strategy for dealing with the complexity of designing in the domain of Human-Building Interaction.

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The “Maker Movement” signifies emergence of a cultural model of a society where anyone can become a creative maker. As part of this movement, various kinds of “Makerspaces” provide physical and social infrastructures that help unleash people’s intrinsic abilities to make, create, and innovate. In this way, makerspaces become loci where maker communities develop as communities of interest and communities of practice. In such communities, participants acquire skills and knowledge through selfdirected peer-learning and learning-by-doing, while leveraging each other’s practical expertise, individual motivations and enthusiasm. The presented work elaborates upon how maker communities within academic design engineering education and everyday-life contexts could better support their participants’ self-directed learning. Throughout two independent researches through design case studies, we investigated how these learning processes could be improved. Both cases involved the iterative development and assessment of service platforms for supporting the social learning processes of makers. One platform focused on documenting and sharing skills of makers, the other on documenting and sharing the making processes leading to a given artefact. Reflecting on the two platforms revealed two distinct aspects of encountered learning. The first aspect involves deepening and mutually encouraging development of individual expert skills. The second aspect involves multidisciplinary alignment during collaborations and peer-learning within a maker community, performed in teams encompassing complementary skills. The lessons learnt lead to proposing a conceptual framework, which aims to provide a support structure to improve self-directed social learning processes in makerspaces.@en

The energy and building research community acknowledges the importance of including occupants' wellbeing in the evaluation of building energy performance. Particularly in office buildings, occupants' comfort assessment is not yet a common practice, partially due to the shortcomings of the comfort assessment activities. Contextual factors such as the organizational culture, occupants' personality traits and emotional states, and the building and research measurement infrastructures do interact with occupants' motivation to report and influence their actual reporting behaviour. By means of an in situ mixed method approach combining real-world research and user-centric methods, this study investigates the impact of a reporting-based comfort assessment. Two buildings, representing different organizational cultures, were selected to study the influence of reporting behaviour on comfort assessment. The buildings were equipped with innovative indoor climate monitoring and in situ comfort reporting infrastructure and 2-week field studies were conducted in both buildings. By discussing results from these studies, this paper contributes to the development of building research methodologies of indoor climate and comfort assessment by providing practical experience in embedding comfort reporting behaviour in the analysis of comfort assessment. A contextual typology of reporting behaviour is introduced and its implications regarding the reliability and validity of comfort reporting techniques are discussed.@en

In Rotterdam, the participatory turn has spurred various bottom-up communities around public parks. These communities aim to take care of the parks in their neighbourhood and search for ways to demonstrate the societal value of their initiative. The current work explores how digital matchmaking services can strengthen community relationships. A research-through-design approach is applied to identify the main barriers hindering community participation. The final design Park Makers uses both Citizen-to-Activity matching and Citizen-to-Citizen matching as ways to engage citizens in the community. The corresponding research demonstrates that connecting park users (or better: future volunteers) with another citizen or activity matching their personal interest fosters community engagement. From this point of view, it might be interesting to focus further research on the potential value of other matchmaking principles, or even other services, for bottom-up citizen communities.@en

This paper presents “progress cards” as a tool that supports design students in planning and reflecting on their design processes, while providing design studio coaches and design methods researchers with structured and in-depth insights into these processes. The progress card is a form that individual student designers or design teams typically fill at the end of each design studio workday. The form contains space for a visual and textual summary of the latest version of the designed experience and a summary of progress regarding the new knowledge generated in the design process. Introducing progress cards in our courses has been causing initial resistance from participating students due to perceived additional workload. However, over time, the format was improved and students developed routines of filling the progress cards, using them to document and reflect on their design processes, and starting to utilise the potential of the format to analyse and manage their own design process from a holistic perspective. The progress cards have also proven valuable in providing insights for the design coaches and design process researchers, both for assessing and guiding the work of students, as well as for comparison of design processes across multiple student teams. After three major revisions, tested by over 400 students, the progress card tool has reached maturity and can be confidently recommended for use in other design studios, while we are investigating further improvements to the tool and its applications for professional design situations.@en

With an increasing population, a growing middle class and increased resource use, our current ways of living and doing business are unsustainable. Next to the implementation of innovative technology, sustainable development based on innovative business models, better understating of customer needs and behavioural change are crucial. This research aims at combining principles from both sustainable business model innovation and user-driven innovation to develop more successful, radical and user-centred sustainable value propositions. Sustainable business model innovation entails developing value propositions that create value for multiple stakeholders at the same time, including customers, shareholders, suppliers and partners as well as the environment and society. User-driven innovation allows developing solutions that are meaningful for people and profitable for business by involving potential customers, users and/or other stakeholders in an experimental and iterative design process. The study adopts a research through design methodology, a qualitative research approach that uses design practice to inform research. To this end, a design project in the framework of the Climate-KIC (the largest European partnership addressing the challenge of climate change) was investigated. As a result, this paper proposes a process for sustainable value proposition design which adopts a thorough, dynamic and iterative perspective (talking to stakeholders, thinking about the problem, testing the product/service) that leads to an actual sustainable value proposition and to a superior problem-solution fit. In practice, managers are provided with an initial methodological framework for mapping and understanding the stakeholders in a broad sense (including and especially users), identifying their needs and interests, and progressively combining them into a more meaningful and enriching value proposition.

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An increasing computing capability is raising the opportunities to use a large amount of publicly available data for creating new applications and a new generation of public services.

But while it is easy to find some early examples of services concerning control systems (e.g. traffic, meteo, telecommunication) and commercial applications (e.g. profiling systems), few examples are instead available about the use of data as a new resource for empowering citizens, i.e. supporting citizens’ decisions about everyday life, political choices, organization of their movements, information about social, cultural and environmental opportunities around them and government choices. Developing spaces for enabling citizens to harness the opportunities coming from the use of this new resource, offers thus a substantial promise of social innovation.

This means that open data is virtually a new resource that could become a new commons with the engagement of interested and active communities. The condition for open data becoming a new commons is that citizens become aware of the potential of this resource, that they use it for creating new services and that new practices and infrastructures are defined, that would support the use of such resource.
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This chapter presents an approach for organising research and innovation in the Living Lab context, where context research instruments, as well as conceptualised, developed and tested prototypes are integrated in one hardware and software platform (BOCS platform). The BOCS platform allows collecting of sensor and building management data, self-reporting of subjective information by users and providing feedback to users through a variety of channels. By this, the platform supports iterative cycles of context researching, co-creating, implementing and testing of solutions. The initial goal for the use of the platform is to enable creation of solutions aiding office occupants in improving their comfort while reducing building energy use. This goal is attained by enabling iterative identification and a gradual build-up of in-depth understanding of involved social practices, and incremental introduction and evaluation of ways to support the change of these social practices through monitoring, self reporting and feedback in office environments. The chapter outlines the organisation of the proposed process in detail. The approach is further positively evaluated based on the outcomes of a preliminary case study. It is finally suggested that in the future the approach may be applied to other Living Lab situations where complex challenges are faced and fast results are expected.

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It is often assumed that providing occupants with feedback about their energy consumption will encourage them to understand their own contribution to energy consumption and stimulate them to save energy as a result. However, providing such feedback in the form of raw data is known to be too difficult for occupants to interpret. There are many examples where raw data has been replaced by easy to read data visualisations, communicated through metaphors, translated to specific tips, or even turned into playful interfaces and games. However, even such approaches often have short-lived impact on occupant behaviour, as they are often not embedded into complex social practices taking place in building environments, and providing individual feedback to occupants proves insufficient. The challenge of developing energy-feedback designs which may trigger lasting behaviour change by engaging social practices of building occupants was taken up by students following the “Interactive Technology Design” (ITD) course at the IDE faculty of TU Delft.

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Improving energy efficiency in commercial buildings is of great importance, given the large percentage of energy consumed in the sector. However, the incentives to save energy in these environments are unusual. From the perspective of managers, energy consumption is only a very small part of the financial burden of companies in comparison to materials, rent or salaries, and thus, economic incentives have a low impact in these environments. On the one hand, unlike in home environments, occupants of office building do not see a direct financial effect on their energy related occupancy practices, as so, their incentive is also not a monetary one. Thus, to effectively reduce energy consumption in office buildings, a different approach should be followed. The Building Occupancy Certification System (BOCS) project aims at developing a building evaluation system focused on the building’s occupancy instead of its technical or physical characteristics. The objective of BOCS is the reduction of energy consumption in office buildings while improving indoor conditions. In this regard, the improvement of indoor conditions and thus, productivity, is the incentive for company managers and staff to implement the BOCS system. Though, keeping environmental awareness visible in the agenda. This paper presents the preliminary results from the first BOCS pilot study in the Netherlands, regarding the building performance in terms of thermal comfort and indoor environmental quality. This study focuses on the data collection and analysis.@en

Energy efficiency in office buildings has focused primarily on technological developments for the optimization of energy building performance. In this effort occupants’ behaviour has often been simplified or ignored. This in turn has resulted in solutions that either have a short-term impact on energy savings or in the long-term the measured impact differs largely from the theoretical estimations. A user-centric view is therefore needed to capture the complexity of occupants’ behaviour in the design of energy saving technologies. Social practices theory describes this complexity as the everyday practices that are characterized by interactions between people’s diverse sets of values and competences and the materials of the environment in which they engage in. Whereas people are constantly adapting their environment to meet their needs, they often perceive an ‘inability to act’ when explicitly asked to change. This opens an opportunity for the design research community to reconsider design interventions not as ends for behavioural change but as means to support practitioners in their discovery and appropriation of materials, competences and values to achieve optimal changes. From a design research perspective supporting these processes requires methods that a) empower occupants to create, test and assess interventions and b) fit in their everyday activities. This paper presents an in-situ and practice-based design process implemented in Living Lab settings with methods that aim to support a multidisciplinary team in the development of reflective design interventions to empower active involvement of building occupants in appropriating changes. The paper presents preliminary findings of an ongoing project and envisages future work to better understand hierarchy of practices and its potential impact on how occupants engage in changingactivities.@en

Moving office organizations and staff culture towards sustainable practices requires a multifaceted and integral approach. In this paper a model with four focal areas for influencing practices is presented. The focal areas are: (i) bottom-up interventions aimed at promoting the adoption of sustainable practices through co-design, (ii) exploring new opportunities for awareness generation, by providing user centric tools and reflective interfaces, (iii) up-scaling, with a focus on how to transform group level changes in practices across the organization, (iv) top-down, which implies creating policy and recognition to promote sustainable practices. The four focal areas have been derived from a series of ongoing pilot studies in the field using co-design methods.@en