Post-harvest losses of vegetables in Ghana can raise up to 50% (Saavedra et al., 2014) depending on the crop. Combatting these losses is crucial for ensuring financial security among commercial smallholder farmers. Amongst other reasons, lack of effective packaging practices is a major contributor to this issue. This thesis therefore focusses on the design of a packaging solution for fresh vegetables for Ghanaian commercial smallholder farmers to reduce post-harvest losses. The challenge lies in designing a simple, cheap and accessible solution that is buildable in the local context.

Extensive literature, desk & field research is conducted to get a broad understanding of the fresh vegetable chain in Ghana and its stakeholders. Part of the research phase takes place in Ghana where stakeholder interviews and field observations are conducted. Visits are made to local farms, markets and supermarkets and interviews are conducted with farmers, market women, consumers, horticulture company and agricultural college. From this opportunities, challenges and barriers within the chain are identified to choose a focus for where to introduce a solution.

With all insights from the research, the focus with the most potential for making impact is chosen together with local stakeholders. The focus of the project with the most potential is: Using banana leaves as transport packaging to local market for tomatoes in crates. The first reason for this is that banana leaves are a cheap material widely available in Ghana that has the potential to be used for packaging purposes. Secondly, inadequate transport packaging is one of the biggest reasons for post-harvest loss. Lastly, tomato is the most grown, eaten and lost vegetable in Ghana. Current packaging in crates offers insufficient protection, but introducing a solution to add to these crates could have a great impact on fighting post-harvest loss without the need for farmers to invest in new crates.

Material tests are performed with banana leaves to discover material boundaries and possibilities of the leaves with which ideas can be evaluated on feasibility. Through rapid prototyping of ideas, iterations are brought to life and evaluated at a fast pace to check their potential. This process eventually leads to the design that has the most potential to reduce post-harvest losses in combination with being cheap and simple to produce without needing many additional resources or tools. This is the leafpad.

The leafpad is a transport protection sheet for transporting tomatoes in crates that can be produced by Ghanaian farmers themselves and is placed in between layers of tomatoes when being transported in wooden crates. The leafpads consist of layers of banana leaves placed over each other and glued with the veins perpendicular to each other. This increases the strength of the sheets. During drying of the sheets, the leaves shrink slightly, creating air pockets that give the sheets thickness that functions as padding. The leafpad absorbs shock and vibration during transport as a result of bad road conditions and function as a layer between the fruits so they don’t directly touch each other. For the production some simple tools are used that can be created at home by the farmers themselves with the help of an instructions guide. Materials are widely available in Ghana and production is cheap.

The design is validated through a transport simulation test and validation with stakeholders in Ghana. For future development scaling up the production process and turning it into a business is recommended so that farmers and other target groups can buy the sheets readily made, eliminating the need for taking time to produce the leafpads at home.

This graduation project explores the problem of teaching engineering education through the course Understanding Product Engineering (UPE) to first year bachelor students at the TU Delft faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, which is a significant issue in the context of the reduction of time allocated to technical subjects in the programme. Moreover, students are not applying their engineering knowledge and skills in their design projects, possibly meaning the way it is educated is not effective. The primary goal of this research is to design an experiential machine, aiming to address the lack of practical, hands-on learning experiences in early engineering education through the development of a prototype and accompanying educational module. This is guided by the Productive Failure learning approach.

The project began with an initial exploration phase, where the different subjects of UPE were explored, a questionnaire was conducted and literature was reviewed to understand the end users’ needs and how to effectively teach subjects. From this, several key findings emerged, including the choice of direction for statics with a focus on beam bending. Additionally, it was discovered that teaching relies heavily on the way motivation in students is created.

Based on these insights, the next phase involved generating design concepts and developing a proof of concept for an experiential machine, guided by the requirements that followed from a deeper look into the subject of statics and beam bending. This concept phase culminated in the embodiment of the Educational Deflection Analyser (EDA), which was further refined through technical assessments and user tests.

To validate the design, two user tests were conducted, and the results indicated that the EDA is a functional proof-of-concept with the potential to engage students by sparking their curiosity to learn something new. Despite requiring some future iterations concerning the usability and full integration in the educational context, the project successfully developed a setup to teach first year students the fundamentals of product engineering.

In conclusion, this report demonstrates that with continued development, the EDA holds the potential to become an effective learning tool in the future to make engineering education enjoyable and see the application reflected in design projects. Future work could focus on the improvement of the user-friendliness, elaborate evaluation and digital integration of the electronics.

A majority of people with dementia live at home. Most people living alone experience problems with wayfinding due to symptoms of their disease, like memory impairment, spatial disorientation, and loss of planning abilities. These problems can cause them to reduce their outside travel range or even stop going on independent outdoor visits altogether. The inability to go outside for errands significantly impacts a person's ability to live independently and can contribute to their institutionalization. This problem is challenging since the ability to go outside and maintain your everyday life is seen as a primary need for people with dementia. Furthermore, being outside is found to improve sleep patterns, slow cognitive decline, and reduce agitation in people with dementia.

Current solutions that help people with dementia in the outdoor environment focus on tracking the person with dementia to warrant their safety. In these products, the person with dementia is a passive user dependent on the person who can see where they are. Navigation devices developed to enable people with dementia to find their direction are all designed for research purposes. Furthermore, these devices give too little context information and are not adaptable to different needs and requirements.

Therefore, this project aims to design a wayfinding device that supports people with early to middle-stage dementia to maintain an active lifestyle by enabling them to navigate to frequent and infrequently visited outdoor places. Safe, independent, & with confidence. The primary target group for using the device is people with dementia. However, the needs and requirements of their informal caregivers were also considered.

Workshops, walks, and interviews showed the struggles people with dementia encounter while they go outside. Moreover, these research activities showed the importance of landmarks for people with dementia while wayfinding. Challenges like complex memory-based navigation steps were also revealed during these activities. Therefore, a personalizable landmark base navigation strategy was used as the basis for the final design.

The final wayfinding device uses NFC cards to activate navigation routes on the smartphone. The person with dementia can carry these navigation cards with them and only has to insert them in a card holder on the back of their phone case to start the navigation system. The navigation system will then guide the person with dementia to their destination by showing a yellow arrow on top of footage from their surroundings using Augmented Reality Navigation. The caregiver's involvement is essential in setting up the navigation system since they must help their loved one by loading the correct route on the navigation card and highlighting personal landmarks.

Multiple tests led to optimizing the interaction between the person with dementia and the navigation app. This resulted in a wayfinding device that supports people with dementia through intuitive navigation cues to visit places independently. This wayfinding device helps people with dementia regain charge over their active lifestyle.

To improve efficiency, dairy farmers monitor the inputs and outputs of their cows based on data collected by sensors. Currently the main sources for this data are the given food and information about the milk (composition and volume). This data helps the farmer make better decisions regarding animal welfare and feeding practices. However, one of the outputs of the cow is currently not monitored, namely the manure.

A system that monitors herd manure data in a barn using sensor technology was proposed. It should give the farmer interpreted feedback enabling him to have more control over farm efficiency both financially and ecologically.

As the modern world progressing towards digital technologies, there is an increasing need for school students to learn programming skills so that they fit into the labor market now and in the future. Tangible programming toys and block-based languages are popular among younger children to learn to code. Students in middle and high school in several countries have begun to learn textual programming education as a step towards successful careers and educational opportunities. However, due to the visual nature of these materials and tools, they are inaccessible to blind students. Also, the accessibility aids used for interacting with computers in the first place are not accessible when it comes to programming. Braille displays are not accessible by most blind users as the braille literacy rates are falling, while screen readers do not read source code. Also, attempts to teach code using screen readers despite challenges kills the student’s enthusiasm. The project proposes a design approach to multi-modal human-computer interaction to reduce sensory and cognitive overload to enhance learning outcomes for this user group. The design goal was to develop an affordable audio-tactile interface, to help blind high school students to learn textual programming languages. Research insights were gathered from literature research, surveys, interviews, observation studies, and co-creation sessions with blind students. The insights were synthesized to form ideas, and concepts were explored. The final concept was then taken to a level of functional prototype and was validated in simulated tests. A sustainable business model was also developed to take the project forward as an open-source hardware venture.