Dutch municipalities are striving for a better connection with their residents and increased mutual trust. Nevertheless, the voice of youth is often overlooked in this process, despite their right to be heard in policies and decisions that affect their lives. This is reinforced by bureaucratic institutions primarily focusing on executing tasks, processes, and protocols, sidelining youth and their needs and causing them to disengage from governments and other institutions. Therefore, a growing need for municipalities to involve youth in their policy making emerges. However, in practice, many policy advisors struggle to do so, despite the availability of various tools and strategies. This project aims to understand barriers to youth participation and develop an approach to enable policy advisors from the municipality of Rotterdam to meaningfully involve youth in policies that affect them.

Through design research, a deep understanding is developed of the challenges and needs of policy advisors regarding youth participation. This included observation and participation within the municipal context, in-depth interviews (n=19), guerrilla interviews (n=50), iterative testing (n=7), and Service Ecosystem Design theory.

The research revealed that various social structures underlie the normalized thinking and behavior of policy advisors: (1) ambiguous beliefs about the value of youth participation, (2) constraints imposed by the (partly unwritten) rules of the municipal system, and (3) entrenched norms and roles. These structures lead to assumptions about the needs of youth and barriers to their involvement in policy.

A learning approach is iteratively designed and tested. With this approach, policy advisors can experience the value of thinking and acting in response to the needs of youth, in an accessible way. These experiences contribute to increasing their motivation and knowledge about involving youth in policy. The approach includes multiple conversations and conducting small experiments that reflect on the current way of working. For example, by shadowing a youth worker for a day or engaging in a conversation with a young person from their own network about a policy question.

Challenging assumptions about youth and their needs through active and attentive experiences proves to be essential to enable policy advisors to reconsider and possibly reshape municipal structures and processes. A personally guided learning process can create space for this, allowing current attitudes and practices to change. These can promote the structural and meaningful use of participatory approaches and result in policies that meet the needs of youth. The project thus offers a new perspective and a small yet fundamental step by the municipality towards a better and mutual relationship with its (younger) residents.

Numansgors is a village seeking to improve sustainability by housing renovation. In this process, the effective participation of homeowners faces multiple challenges. The Pattern Language Theory (PLT), a design methodology first proposed by Alexander Christopher in 1970s, shows its potential in tackling these challenges. However, as PLT has been applied in broadening domains, various approaches to using PLT are different from the original one taken by Alexander. As these differences and their basis generally go unarticulated, practitioners referring to such cases may fail to choose an appropriate approach and hence use PLT less effectively. Therefore, to support the effective ue of PLT, either in Numansgors or in other domains, this graduation project aims to support differentiating between diverse PLT approaches, and deciding on a PLT approach.
In the beginning, to better understand the topic, a literature review of PLT was conducted. The benefits of PLT were identified, which later confirmed its suitability in Numansgors. Besides, eight purposes of using PLT were summarised and were later found essential in deciding on PLT approaches.
Next, to understand the different approaches, an integrative review — which I called deconstruction, identifying and reconstruction — of multiple cases was performed. The external manifestations and internal reasons for different approaches were identified. On the outward, the different approaches are manifested in four components. On the inward, the approaches root in
practitioners’ diverging values and needs. These insights were concretised into three tools, which were later incorporated into the final research output.
Afterwards, to find out how the three tools could be used in practice, workshops were organised for inspiration. In these workshops, some other issues in deciding on PLT approaches were found. These issues were tackled by formulating a procedure to use PLT and refining the classification of activities around PLT. All these insights were synthesised into the final research output, the Activity Kit, to support practitioners in deciding on their PLT approaches. With this Activity Kit, practitioners can first consider their project purposes, then find the activities recommended for the purposes, and finally execute the activities with the support of relevant tools.
To validate the use of Activity Kit, the Numansgors project was taken as an example. A three-stage plan for Numansgors was generated by using the Activity Kit. It is recommended to evaluate the Activity Kit with more cases and keep up with the influence of the pattern language in Numansgors.

Within the Energy Transition, citizen involvement is essential. In the end, we have to change together to succeed within the Energy Transition. Because of the local character of the Energy Transition and a responsibility shift, the municipalities have got the challenging task to increase citizen involvement. Local energy initiatives can be a promising solution for the Energy Transition. Therefore, the local energy initiatives can be interesting for municipalities when increasing citizen involvement.
The aim of this research is to find a way for the municipality to make use of these local energy initiatives when trying to increase citizen involvement in the Energy Transition. The specific context of this research is the city of The Hague. The following research question has been formulated for this purpose: How can the municipality of The Hague increase citizen participation in the Energy Transition through local energy initiatives?
In order to answer the research question, a collective case study and a design process are executed. In advance, preparatory research was conducted to explore relevant theoretical concepts for the research and to analyze the stakeholder ecosystem of the local energy initiatives. The collective case study was performed by conducting nine in-depth interviews with local energy initiatives based on a research framework. This research framework was substantiated by the Transformative Social Innovation framework. Furthermore, the design process is based on the Double Diamond approach using divergent and convergent thinking. Within this design process, multiple participatory elements were included like workshops and prototyping sessions with local energy initiatives and civil servants of the municipality of The Hague.
From the research, it appeared that the local energy initiatives in The Hague fulfill a basic role and five specific roles, namely ‘awareness creation’, ‘action perspective creation’, ‘collaboration with the municipality’, ‘voice at the table’, and ‘execution and ownership’. It also came forward that the potential of the contribution of the local energy initiatives to the Energy Transition is not reached. This has three reasons. Firstly, there is no shared vision among the stakeholders. Secondly, the relationship with the municipality is undefined and inconsistent. Thirdly, there are several small challenges as keeping the initiative going, reaching out to people, and not being representative for the neighborhood. When looking at the relationship, the core challenge seemed a way to prioritize and choose the municipal support to provide, to which initiative, and at which moment.
Based on this, a final concept was developed to create a strategy and action repertoire for the municipal support per neighborhood and initiative. The strategy is created based on three main questions regarding which roles to support, which support to provide, and how to provide the support. These questions are answered through the three perspectives of Design Thinking (desirability, feasibility, and viability) to cover the multiple aspects to consider when creating the strategy. Possible further research could focus on the development of the final concept in real-life cases and on the applicability of the five initiative’s roles and final concept in other contexts.

This project focuses on enhancing the accessibility of 3D printing for repairers by designing a system in which repairers can collaborate with makers. Repair has become rare in societies with an abundance of cheap goods. However in recent years repair is making a gradual comeback in western culture. Citizen repair initiatives such as Repair Cafés have popped up in cities all over the world. They support people to fix their broken things. The increasing popularity of the ‘Maker Movement’ and 3D printing has allowed skilled individuals to create, share and produce their own spare parts for repair. While most modern makers also repair things, most repairers are not capable of making things using digital fabrication methods like 3D printing. To analyse why most repairers can’t use 3D printing and how the 3D printing process can be changed, the context of repairers, makers, 3D printing and reverse engineering was explored. The main findings were translated into design requirements that were used as guidelines in a conceptualisation process. During this phase multiple ideas were tested and iterated on in three different layers: information for repairers, physical tools for part measurement and communication with makers. After a number of iterations a final concept was proposed that enables repairers to ‘manually’ 3D scan an object, using a caliper, and digitally share it with makers so that they can support them in replicating the object through CAD modelling and 3D printing. The system was tested with a small group of repairers and discussed with experts. After implementing those insights, the final design is proposed. The final design is a product service system that consists of a toolkit for repairers and an online platform through which repairers can collaborate with makers on 3D printing for repair projects. The toolkit contains a CyberCaliper, which is a special caliper that makes it easier for repairers to ‘manually’ 3D scan their desired part and post it on the platform. The platform is designed to become the place to be for requesting 3D printed spare parts online. This graduation project is part of the ShaRepair project funded by the Interreg North-West Europe programme under grant agreement NWE982.

Many cities in the Netherlands have poor areas that have to deal with a lot of social problems. One of the approaches that policymakers use to improve these areas is the so- called gentrification approach. In this approach policy makers renovate and rebuild parts of the neighborhoods in order to attract more ‘better educated’ citizens to these neighborhoods. Although it seems this approach enables a mix of different social capitals, research show the opposite. A lot of research is conducted on how these negative effects of gentrification can be reduced.

According to Van der Graaf (2009) the solution is not to understand how to solve the social cohesion, but to research the actual causes of this lack of social cohesion. The changes in spatial elements and social structure that gentrification implies, lead to a decreased or even a disappeared attachment to the neighborhood. The aim of this master thesis is to investigate how the feeling home of residents in neighborhoods that are being transformed could be improved. A research through design approach has been used to perform this research. This research provides a new perspective on how policymakers can deal with the negative effects of gentrification.

A conceptual framework of the feeling home is developed to understand how to research the feeling home in neighborhoods. Spangen is characterized as a gentrified neighborhood with a diversity of people and high involvement. Although it seems that the high involvement solves the problems with gentrification in Spangen, it reinforces the gap between strong (close friend) and weak ties (acquaintance) in Spangen. This high involvement is often the result of the effort of particular groups (strong ties) that are not representative for the neighborhood. There are also residents that do not even have weak ties in the neighborhood. This gap explains also why public spaces in Spangen are often (partly) appropriated by one group. A group with strong ties that excludes others from using the place.

This gap is visible when a citizen’s initiative is requested for this public space. The groups that initiate the initiative usually operate individual and that often results in social exclusion and conflict. Other residents are not satisfied with their share in the process or even not aware of the possibilities to be involved. Therefore, the design aims to make the development process of a citizen’s initiative in public space accessible for interested residents to create representative public support for the initiative.

The BuurThuis concept shows that by making participating more accessible, people are able to appropriate the place and to explain their needs towards the place and the place. Since both aspects are needed to feel home, BuurThuis presents a participation tool that stimulates the feeling home. BuurThuis shows that is not always needed to foster real-life interaction between people in contrary what most policymakers strive for. The insights of this research support the research of Van der Graaf (2009) that advices governments to focus on supporting neighborhoods to live together instead of directly connecting people.

Many active citizens that work on improving their neighborhoods have in-depth local knowledge (small data), but are oftentimes not directly involved in the decision-making processes of city officials. A top-down push is witnessed to make smart use of open data for the development of social solutions and services. However, this creates a gap for those citizens that are willing to work on social innovations, but lack technical skills and people that do have these required skills. Numbers and facts have taken a leading role in the decision-making process, which makes data concrete building blocks for argumentation to make knowledge claims about the world (D’Ignazio, 2017). To also include those active citizens in the decision-making process, this graduation project explores how data can support active citizens in their participatory activities and how they can make a valuable connection to their local knowledge by means of design. In Delfshaven Rotterdam, active citizens have taken over the control of public parks and have realized many green initiatives to improve the livability of the neighborhoods. Organizing and managing these parks themselves does not come without facing issues. The context of these green initiatives is taken as a case study for the project to research what problems and obstacles occur in self-managing and organizing these parks and to understand how data can be off support. The conducted research with the green initiatives revealed that they can find common ground with the municipality to show that they are working on mutual goals to improve the liveability of the neighborhoods. Furthermore, combining their deep-rooted insights (small data) gained, by being actively involved in the neighborhoods, with factual data can create a more complete picture of the problems that occur in the neighborhoods. Literature review substantiated that in order to form a complete picture of these real-world problems, both numbers and stories should be combined (Wang, 2016). Standing stronger in political debate happens when stories can be combined with numbers which compels others. In order for factual data to support their initiatives, the challenges the initiators face should be clearly defined. To support citizens to work with data, hackathons can be used as a means to facilitate this process. A more human-centered approach has been identified for such an event by focussing on collective issue articulation as a design practice (DiSalvo & Lotado, 2011) to support defining and analyzing a problem through the sharing of local stories. Stimulating multiple stakeholders to bring their perspectives on a problem into a discussion helps to gain an understanding of the underlying, factors, relations, consequences and actors. This ‘data-analysis process’ can be seen as story-finding, which has a more appropriate approach for non-technical citizens to work with data (Bhargava et al., 2017). To explore the potential of story-finding as data analysis process, several workshop have been conducted that all included data explorations. For these workshops, tools were prototyped as means to facilitate the process. The insights gained showed that in order to find relevant data to explore, first problems that are faced should be clearly defined and communicated. This lead to the the design vision: “A co-creation/ participatory process that helps expert initiators to translate neighborhood problems in a structured way into local cases by combining their local perspectives with factual data to tell a compelling story.” This projected resulted in a process toolkit ‘Blik op Buurt’ which proposes a clear structure to collaboratively surface and define problems in the neighborhood and helps to select potential partners and communicate these insights to them. By going through a story-finding process, initiators are stimulated to make use of their contextual data (small data) about the neighborhood problem in order to reveal missing information and knowledge. This process is facilitated by a set of tools. A collective setting not only stimulates shared ownership to commit to tackle these problems, but also support the self-organization in how they can break down the problems so that their stories can be comprehended and be supported with data from different perspectives. To evaluate the finale outcome and validate the effect, the Blik op Buurt process and tools should be tested by a citizen initiative through conducting a problem case study.

The project is an initiative to revitalize a multicultural shopping street in Rotterdam, called Middellandstraat. The design question was how to support the shops to attract more visitors to the shopping street through the food diversity. Investigations into the visitors' experience in the street, the context, and market research were done to define opportunities for the design development. The final design aims to enable people to be inspired and informed about the shop's authentic identity and historical value, make visitors feel comfortable in the shops to allow them to explore the Middellandstraat.