This report describes the process of designing a ventilation concept for the renovation industry. The project is in collaboration with Breman Schoorsteentechniek, an installation company located in the Netherlands. The initial brief was kept vague on purpose and described a project in which I was to find a way for Breman, to make their products more recognizable on the market. At the time, Breman was starting to rebuild their companies vision with ecologically sustainable intentions.

The initiation of the project became a search for what the vision for this product should be. Next to a small analysis of the current workflow, a trends and development research was conducted. This resulted in core movements for the year 2030 in the fields of: sustainability, construction industry and general world developments. These were then used to communicate a proposed world vision and were discussed with the board members of Breman. From these meetings three ideas where generated. After consideration of the core movements and the initial aspirations of the project, the direction of ventilation in renovation was chosen.

After a short transition from this general vision to the design phase, I constructed a model in which I could order my decisions. The model made that the overall design stayed consistent and that gaps in the argumentation for the concept could be determined. Concluding from this model, I designed a component based product. This product consists of a full central ventilation system with integrated IoT functionality. A distinction was made between a full fletched version and a budget version. I implemented the product in a virtual space, to offer a more tangible impression of the product.

With the conclusion of the design phase, I continued to a small evaluation phase. The virtual space visualisations where used in meetings with experts on different levels of the ventilation industry and the field of plastic injection molding. The gained feedback on the feasibility, desirability and viability of the concept was then used in combination with left over insights of the project, to write recommendations for Breman. As a conclusion to the project, the initial brief is reflected upon. The final result is Breman flow, the next step for ecologically sustainable ventilation in the renovation industry.

Keeping a healthy work/life balance can be a daunting task in today’s overstimulated society. For many of us, a regular day can feel like running on a treadmill. This results in fast, restricted and shallow breathing throughout the day. Whereas, the right breathing rhythm can have a profound impact on our (mental) well being and overall happiness. It is argued that habituating deep breathing exercises is a promising solution to increase stress resilience. This explorative study aims to find a productisable solution for habituating breathwork meditation. The proposed solution (Sensescape) is supported with a novel, yet ‘grounded’ theory. The working principle of the product is validated with several small scale user tests and experiments. Furthermore, market potential was explored via market analysis, business modelling and strategic roadmapping. It is argued that Sensescape is able to differentiate itself from the competition by building a closed-loop-system in horizon 2 and a focus on first-responders in horizon 3. A brand identity was crafted based on those insights. Sensescape, is a handheld meditation device to guide breathing, through haptic and light feedback. Soothing vibrations will bounce between two handheld pulsators, to orchestrate the right breathing pattern. This will help you to ‘get out of your head’ and unwind from everyday stress. On top of that, the immersive tactile effect will naturally grab your attention and sustain focus during a meditative session. An extensive literature review was performed on the areas of neural entrainment, tactile vibrations, rumination and the art of breathing. These areas formed the foundation for the building of the novel grounded-theory. It was found that; bilateral tactile phantom sensations lead to easy neural entrainment. This phenomenon is exploited in the working principle of the product to create a natural point of focus. The physical sensations will help disrupt negative thought flow. Through some experimental sound engineering and an iterative approach, soothing phantom vibrations were designed. The user experience was shown in a live demonstration. See video here: https://youtu.be/VfWNLbKRofI

The graduation project is performed in collaboration with Henkel Laundry & Home Care business unit. This consumer goods business has flourished into a globally active unit with a broad product portfolio.To succeed in the highly competitive consumer goods environment, it is essential to shifting from price and product superiority to privileged insights and customer experience. It is the overall consumer behavioural, experiential, and emotional responses formulate the outcome of a commodity. But the current product development is mainly performance-driven. A holistic and well-defined product experience can help Henkel innovation teams to broaden their development goals to think beyond feasibility, functionality, and usability.The consumer research found that people experience laundry activity as a unified whole, not just the detergent itself. The detergent product experience is embedded in the laundry experience, and their interrelationship sometimes conflicts but remain mutually exclusive. In a broader sense, the laundry activity is highly integrated into daily life. Thus, the meanings people assigned to a laundry product are co-shaping by the other actors within the laundry systems. They are washing machine manufacture, textile and fabric manufacture, laundry services providers. Their interrelationships with the consumer in meaning creating are depicted in the figure above.From the organization side, Henkel current innovation follows the traditional stage-gate process in which marketing will identify the consumer insights and transfer to R&D as a development brief. The key challenge here is the misalignment between these functions in the business case building stage, which leads to the product offering that cannot serve the initial product promise.The design proposal was built on the innovation process, enhance the marketing and R&D integration by resourceful sense-making-ex- pose, co-opt, and repurposing. The original brand-fit gate was replaced by brand-technology gate, brand-meaning gate, and resource gate to adapt to more radical innovation. It also suggests the organization to open its problem finding space with external interpreters.

This graduation project aimed at refining X!Delft’s value proposition and exploring the role of Design Thinking for their organisation. X!Delft is an organisation within the valorisation centre of Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), responsible for setting up partnerships with industry in favour of knowledge and technology transfer. X!Delft intends to create an ‘innovation ecosystem’ in which TU Delft, companies, and startups work together on “new inventions” (van Wijnen, 2019). However, stimulating collaboration between multiple companies in such an ecosystem proves to be challenging. Hence, the ecosystem is now predominantly used for company-specific challenges. To encourage working as an ecosystem, it is essential to understand the partners’ needs upon entering a partnership with X!Delft. This enables the creation of a relevant value proposition, describing how X!Delft’s service offering adds value to its partners.A way to incorporate the needs of partners into a relevant value proposition is by means of Design Thinking (DT). DT is a human-centred innovation approach suitable for understanding and providing for people’s and companies (latent) needs (Hooge et al., 2012; Carlgren, 2013). To discover what incentivises companies to opt for a partnership with X!Delft, seventeen semi-structured interviews and three creative sessions were conducted. The research uncovers a shared driver across the industry partners of X!Delft, namely the sense of suspense. Suspense is defined as “a feeling or state of anxious or excited uncertainty about what may happen” (Oxford University Press , 2019). It complements literature’s description of ‘uncertainty’, by adding a factor of excitement and wonder, triggering an impulse to act. (Lehne & Koelsch, 2015). In order to understand how to manage suspense, the pragmatist inquiry proved to be useful (Lorino, 2018). In this inquiry, one moves from an uncertain situation towards a future ‘belief’, by combining experimentation and reasoning. Similarly, design practices are beneficial to coming up with future-focused solutions when considering situations of uncertainty or ambiguity.This resulted in the proposal of a new approach, PACES. The approach structures and expands X!Delft’s services so they “Preserve And Cultivate Effective Suspense”. This ‘effective suspense’, which incentivises engagement in a learning process, is cultivated in six phases: perceiving, perspective, predicting, paraphrasing, probing and proving. PACES stimulates collecting information continuously (perceiving) and sharing insights, increasing the collective knowledge base (perspective) to generate plausible predictions. These are then made actionable (paraphrasing) based on the strategic intent of individual actors, ensuring company-specific impact through the development of experiments (probing) followed by implementation projects (proving). A first ideation step is performed to translate PACES into services, complementing X!Delft’s current service offering. These services aim to incentivise participation in shared knowledge creation, hence enhancing collaboration in the innovation ecosystem. It is suggested to implement these shared services gradually - first stimulating collaboration in the first phases, and slowly moving to the last phases, where most of the knowledge creation takes place. In conclusion, some direction for future research and further development of PACES are given.