This project aims to enhance vertical farming through the development of innovative growing trays equipped with integrated ventilation channels that blow air vertically from beneath the plants. This vertical air supply ensures optimal air distribution, creating a microclimate at the plant level with ideal temperature, humidity, and CO2 levels, leading to healthier and more efficient crop growth.

More and more (young) working adults in the Netherlands experience burnout-related stress symptoms. Although the focus of office environments is more focused on vitality, this trend keeps rising.

Products that already focus on awareness of well-being turn out to not be sustainable or even intrusive. Employees on the other hand seem to be burdened by occupational pressure while most people are like-minded when it comes to prioritising well-being over work.

Micro-breaks are necessary for keeping a steady energy level and most importantly required during stressful periods with high workloads.

The product solution is a simplified communication tool with only one purpose, communicating micro-breaks. The tools consist of a little display and are all connected. Every workplace or employee has such a product and by connecting it to your work computer or telephone, micro-breaks can be communicated with people in the same team. Different kinds of breaks can be communicated, depending on the team and facilities of the company. When team members are invited to participate in a micro-break they can simply accept, decline, or ignore the invitation.

The product aims to bring structure to taking breaks in a work environment and provides reminders during busy and stressful periods. In addition, the solution supports social interactions to lower the threshold for taking breaks. Ultimately to create a healthy working atmosphere in various environments.

Telework has tremendous potential benefits that can be the solution for problems as traffic jams, work-life conflict and even the environment. But there are still numerous obstacles that need to be overcome for telework to live up to its full potential. The proposed solution to overcome these problems is by developing more ‘human’ solutions, which means to innovate from a human perspective. This project proposes a concept that can be seen as a step towards this vision: “A more human digital workplace”. It provides one example of how technological innovations can occur through user understanding. This example has taken the form of a concept called The Hotline. A need for better cross-site collaboration has been identified and through numerous Tryout iterations the Hotline concept occured. The concept has been validated with end users. In a survey 70% of the respondents wanted the Hotline to stay and 44% was willing to pay over five euros each month for the service. At the same time organizations as Barco, the case company of this thesis, struggle with understanding their user. This is a common problem of larger organizations. Barco is a business to business technology company specialized in image processing technology. Barco has three departments: Entertainment, Healthcare and Enterprise. The last department offers solutions for the workplace such as Clickshare, a wireless presentation tool. The Enterprise department has a focus on the future of work making it the perfect candidate to receive this thesis. In parallel this project also shows the taken steps from idea to user value. The process can serve as input for best practices in the fuzzy front end of new product development.

This master’s thesis documents the design process behind Microfarm, a small-scale indoor farm designed specifically for restaurants. Facilitator of this project is Priva, which is a company specialized in horticulture and venturing into indoor farming. Indoor farming involves growing edible plants in closed structures using artificial lighting The first phase of the project aims at understanding Priva and the technical principle behind indoor farming as well as determining which competing products exist and which users are interesting to design for. It is concluded by choosing a specific market segment, which are high-end restaurants. Based on this result, an ideal scenario is created and seven restaurants are interviewed and analyzed using techniques from contextmapping. It is concluded with a design vision that serves as input for ideation. Next, multiple aspects of the ideal scenario are ideated upon, such as the Priva Portal which supplies restaurants with their growing supplies, and working out specific details regarding the physical design and technical aspects. Following ideation, three concepts are proposed, with one being chosen through objective criteria. In the first iteration, the concept now known as Microfarm is further worked out and a business model and prototype are developed and validated. In the second iteration, a customer journey is set up for generating new ideas in enhancing the guest’s indoor farming experience, resulting in Nanofarm, and Microfarm’s design is changed to be smaller and compacter as a result of the first iteration. The last phase of the report describes the final designs of Microfarm and Nanofarm as well as Priva Portal and the business model. Recommendations are given and the project is evaluated. The project is concluded by stating that a small indoor farm is feasible and that high end restaurants are a fitting context for such a product, but there is a considerable chance that such a product will ultimately not work regarding the small impact such a product will have compared to the amount of resources a restaurant will have to invest.