Our current food system puts a lot of pressure on our planet, global health, animal welfare, and creates an unfair agricultural economy. One of the strategies to decrease this pressure while serving the growing population is the protein transition. As Weinricht (2018) states, “Shifting our collective diet from eating mainly animal proteins to focusing on more plant-based proteins”. Currently this transition does not resonate with everyone. Not everyone is willing or able to participate.

One of the stakeholders working in this context is the Voedingscentrum (the Netherlands Nutrition Centre). The Voedingscentrum aims to encourage consumers to eat less meat. Additionally, they are seeking interventions to reach people with a low socioeconomic position (or ‘SEP’). Due to more pressing concerns, this group often has limited capacity to make long-term changes, such as adopting a healthier and more sustainable diet.

The goal of this project is to design an intervention that addresses resistance in the protein transition and enables the Voedingscentrum to reach people with a low SEP who are unwilling or unable to embrace the protein transition.

To determine a fitting design direction, the project began with research into the protein transition, consumers with a low SEP, and behavior change theory related to resistance. This was accomplished through various research activities, including literature and field reserach. The collected insights led to ten clusters representing the factors that influence people’s behavior in this context. Structuring these clusters and evaluating the resulting social context led to the following design goal:

“To facilitate a healthy shift towards a more plant-based diet, we want to help consumers feel secure in such a change by stimulating them to joyfully follow others.”

The designed concept, ‘Spaar je vol’, is a savings campaign or ‘spaaractie’ that allows consumers to save stamps while grocery shopping. With a full card of stamps, these customers receive a healthy vegetarian meal box containing fresh ingredients for a meal for four persons. The meals are created by the Voedingscentrum and come with easy-to-follow instructions. This campaign offers the Voedingscentrum a practical way to influence what people consume without relying solely on their ability to obtain, understand, assess, and use health information for decision-making. The variety of meal boxes offers vegetarian options without explicitly stating it, promoting a shift towards a healthier protein consumption pattern and reinforcing the new norm.

To cater to consumers with limited financial resources, supermarket customers can also donate their stamps to the Voedselbank (Food Bank). The donated stamps will be converted into donated meal boxes and distributed through the Voedselbank.

The conducted evaluation sessions provided insights from the target audience and stakeholders, demonstrating that the concept was positively received. However, additional steps need to be taken regarding the (financial) feasibility of the project.

This project contains an in-depth case study that demonstrates how behavior change theory can be applied when on dealing with resistance during the design of interventions. It offers an intervention for consumers with a low SEP and provides multiple recommendations for further steps within this domain.

The Protein Transition is a societal transition that resolves around shifting society towards consuming more plant-based proteins instead of animal proteins. There are numerous drivers for this transition, the most well-known and considerable ones being climate change, animal welfare, public health and unfair agricultural economics.

To accelerate the Protein Transition, we need to understand the role and impact of food cultures in this transition. Culture is recognised as a promising strategic lever for accelerating societal transitions, but literature and methodology on the subject are limited. The intersection of transition design and culture has never been explicitly studied up until now. This thesis aims to fill the knowledge gap on how culture can impact societal transitions and what design methodology is needed to address this.

The thesis focuses on Dutch food culture. Animal proteins play a significant role in Dutch food culture. They are part of many rituals, traditions and behaviours. This is the result of a collection of socio- behavioural and cultural factors, including, but not limited to, meat and dairy being part of the Dutch identity, the government undertaking conscious efforts to increase meat and dairy consumption, a feeling of entitlement to meat and dairy, and meat and dairy being regarded as symbols of wealth and prosperity.

After gaining an understanding of Dutch food culture, it was decided to continue by studying a specific food culture. The borrel is a uniquely Dutch eating practice that can be considered its own food culture because of the many symbols and rituals linked to it. The methods used were a historical analysis,
interviews, observations and culture sensitive design models. By studying Dutch food culture and borrel culture, knowledge has been accumulated on how to study a food culture effectively.

This comes down to the seven principles for culture sensitive design for the Protein Transition:
1. History: How did we get here?
2. Consider the whole system (macro - meso – micro).
3. Scoping: Food cultures are huge; you cannot study them all.
4. Embrace diversity: Acknowledge different perspectives and conflicts.
5. Be aware of your own biases and experiences.
6. Keep your goal in mind.
7. Developing cultural sensitivity for transition design is a lifelong process.

All the accumulated knowledge has been compiled into a field guide for designers: the Food Culture Field Guide, which consists of an A6-sized guidebook and a card deck with 35 cards. The field guide contains information on studying (Dutch) food cultures and guides designers in their design process. This will help them create more culturally sensitive design interventions to accelerate the Protein Transition.

This project tackled two research questions for separate clients. The first question was posed by Livework, a service design agency, which wanted to learn how systemic design principles can be applied in projects aimed at organisational sustainability transformations. The second client, Juvenile Company, a company that designs and manufactures strollers and other juvenile products, wanted to figure out what their relationship with customers and business partners should look like to reach their sustainability goals by 2035.
Through a series of analyses and co-creative design activities, I discovered two key factors that might serve as an opportunity or barrier in Juvenile Company’s transition towards a more sustainable future: the relationship between parent and stroller in the current system and Juvenile Company’s culture of product innovation through design.
Using context mapping, insight into the value exchanges between parent and stroller over time were captured. This led to identifying three distinct phases of value creation tied to a child’s developmental stages. It was found that the value implicitly delivered by the stroller over these developmental stages is the core value proposition of Juvenile Company.
It was found that Juvenile Company’s current strategy of revenue growth through product innovation is at odds with its sustainability goals. To achieve its sustainability goals, Juvenile Company must rely on qualitative innovation, rather than quantitative, to drive revenue growth.
Using the input from all research, a vision statement was formulated that describes the possibility space of Juvenile Company’s future innovation. “Juvenile Company empowers parents and their children to explore the world by providing value beyond products that adapts to parents’ changing needs without compromising the future needs of their children.”
A design strategy concept was created to describe what a circular Juvenile Company will need to look like to be fully circular. The concept consists of four elements that build on one another. At the deepest layer sits a new mental model: a culture of innovation through qualitative value creation. To create qualitative value, on the next layer up we find a reframed version of the core value proposition discovered through the context mapping research. Juvenile Company focuses on developing value explicitly for the three developmental stages identified. To guide the development of this value, three core vision principles were developed: Value beyond products, Adapting to changing needs and Dependable guide. To further illustrate these vision principles, thirteen key propositions were designed that help shape what the relationship between parents and Juvenile Company could look like in the future.
This strategy was conceptualised through two deliverables: a parent-Juvenile Company relationship journey map that describes how the key elements to the relationship interlink, and a children’s book that describes the story of how one family’s relationship with Juvenile Company develops over time.
Through constant reflection over the course of this process, key insight was created into how Livework designers can implement systemic design principles in organisational sustainability transformation projects. A knowledge gap was identified, consisting of three layers that each describe a different type of knowledge Livework designers must acquire. Additionally, it was found that a major difficulty in applying systemic design principles will be adopting an ecosystemic design lens that focuses equally on human and non-human participants of a system. Further implications and opportunities were identified that might shape how Livework approaches design projects.

We live in a world where our plates are filled with convenience and our choices are influenced by an environment full of temptation. The current food system places immense pressure on planetary boundaries and affects people’s health.

A large portion of the Dutch population does not stick to healthy diet guidelines, including the citizens of Rotterdam. This city has the highest national rates of overweight and obesity among adults and children. In recent years, major changes have occurred in the city’s food landscape. The number of fresh food providers has decreased by 38 percent, while the number of fast-food locations has increased by 46 percent, especially noticeable in low socioeconomic status (SES) neighbourhoods (Mölenberg, 2021). This, coupled with rising food prices and limited financial resources, leads to less healthy lifestyles and increased health risks among citizens of low SES neighbourhoods.

The municipality of Rotterdam has the responsibility to secure the health of the city and its citizens. Among initiatives undertaken, the municipality takes part in the City Deal ‘Healthy and sustainable food environment’, to improve the food landscape in collaboration with other municipalities. Within this framework, and in partnership with the municipality of Rotterdam, this project has been initiated with the research question:

“How can the municipality of Rotterdam stimulate VMBO students toward adopting a healthier and more sustainable diet?”

Literature and field research findings reveal that VMBO students’ dietary choices are influenced by individual factors, their social environment, and the physical environment. VMBO students are in the midst of their development, in which their friend group and social status are important. Consequently, a design statement addressing these aspects has been created using the Social Implication Design (SID) method (Tromp & Hekkert, 2014):

“To ensure VMBO students will make healthy dietary choices, I want them to feel cool among their friends by making healthy choices tempting.”

The final concept, developed in co-creation with the target group and in line with the design statement, includes two design interventions to promote healthier dietary choices among VMBO students. The first intervention is the ‘Eat to your Beat’ food festival at school. Through a variety of festive activities, VMBO students gain knowledge and skills related to healthy eating. The first intervention aims to actively engage students to experience and discover that healthy food can be tasty and fun. The second intervention, ‘Eat smart, Play hard’, uses street art to draw the attention of VMBO students to healthy food choices. The art is linked to an online challenge complemented by a social media campaign. This intervention aims to seductively showcase healthy foods and engage with the target group in their online world.

Lastly, a roadmap presents the required steps for the municipality of Rotterdam to implement the design interventions. The first horizon of the roadmap focuses on laying the foundation, the second one is on expanding the concept, and the last horizon is on optimising the performance.

The concept aims to activate the municipality and improve the health of VMBO students in Rotterdam South by making healthy food cool!