Hallmark Cards has a long tradition as a global brand and has designed and sold a countless amount of greeting cards. However Hallmark is also under pressure, because the greeting card industry is declining and the younger target group is using more and more social media to send quick messages and to congratulate each other. Therefore, Hallmark should look for new ways to connect the younger target group to its brand.
During this master thesis a product proposal and roadmap will be created to connect a younger target group to Hallmark in the following years.
Hallmark is a creative company with a warm atmosphere. However, they are currently in a dilemma between its retail and online department. Where online sales grow by 5% per year, retail sales decline by 8%. However, retail is still responsible for 80% of the company's turnover. Hallmark doesn’t have a clear strategy what its internal focus should be. Furthermore, Hallmark is already looking for ways to innovate, but these innovations are mainly variations on the current greeting card and not something completely new or different.
However, this is necessary, since the current industries in which Hallmark is active are not the most ideally in the long term. The retail greeting card industry is declining rapidly and the online industry faces a strong competition for both greeting cards and gifts. During this project, routine innovation will be conducted to explore a new industry.
This new industry should connect to the younger target group, who experience problems with relationships. They are insecure and have to deal with a lot of stress. Furthermore, they have not much close friends and this is partly due to social media. There is therefore a need to strengthen relationships. Research shows that this is done best by enjoying experiences together and based on validated models, a new experience model has been developed. This experiences model will be the basis for the new product proposal. In addition to this model, experiences must be easy to consume and fit the target group.
However, Hallmark must also be able to offer experiences, without expensive investments. Therefore, Surprise Night has been developed. Suprise Night is a monthly subscription to a date box, which contains all elements for a surprising date night. The concept is targeted at couples who have been together for a longer period and are in need of new, original dates.
Hallmark is able to immediately start offering these boxes, but because the concept can easily be implemented by other parties, it is important to quickly expand to other target groups. Finally, a roadmap is provided, which enables Hallmark to grow into the activities industry, which should become a separate department within the company.

The first fully autonomous vehicles of Ford will be launched in 2021, and the revolution has been carried out not only self-driving technologies but also new business models. I.e., the establishment of Ford Smart Mobility LLC has demonstrated its ambition to seek new mobility business models rather than a focus on manufacturing vehicles itself. Hereby, Ford has partnered with Lyft and Domino's to seize opportunities of self-driving cars with regard to ride-hailing and on-demand delivery services. Meanwhile, Ford evinced a burning interest of applying autonomous vehicles in logistics field in the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show. As a result, the design direction of logistics/delivery was decided. Future-oriented products such as autonomous cars, are ideal to plan and develop by a top-down approach. However, the approach is lacking of the voices from small and medium-sized companies, local organizations, and regional communities. Therefore, it is an opportunity for Ford to build up an autonomous mobility service by a bottom-up approach which empowers SMEs and local residents to customize the transits according to their needs. And so, the challenge of this project is "sensing logistics opportunities from SMEs to form a service model as a local initiative by means of autonomous vehicles of Ford". The double diamond design process was adopted to guide through this project. It started from a research phase to seize design insights, and then come up with design concepts based on the findings. In order to response to the challenge, the design methods of in-depth interview and future workshop were adopted to come up with design concepts via a bottom-up mindset. Ultimately, twelve interviewees had participated, they are business owners, delivery drivers, logistics stuffs, and logistics and transportation professors. The findings of the interviews were summarized as four case studies and twelve design directions. The cases cover from delivery types of business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and a small delivery company. In addition, the twelve design directions demonstrated the need and the want regarding to logistics in SMEs. Namely, information, companies, social value & network, best planning, delivery, interaction, and supply chain. The design directions illustrated the current needs of SMEs, and the future workshop supplemented the expectations of autonomous vehicles from a perspective of community. Totally twenty-four expectations were generated from the future workshop. In the end, initial design concepts were come up with the integration of the twelve design directions and the twenty-four expectations. Collective Mobility Assistant, the final design concept, is a burden free autonomous mobility platform for SMEs/local residents. It offers four types of mobility: Delivery, Transit, Tour, and Event, which enables SMEs/local residents to transport goods or people according to their needs. Alternatively, the platform can be used as open space for people to contribute their personal skills for the communities. The autonomous mobility service offered by Ford invites more people to join the platform without worrying about the moving issue. The value of Collective Mobility Assistant matches the brand values of Ford "people serving people" and "commitments to the community".

Autonomous driving technologies are expected to revolutionize the way people will
experience travel time and interact with new means of transportation. Simultaneously, the consumer mind-set is found shifting from the desire to own towards gathering meaningful experiences and having access to services and goods on demand. Thus, it its proposed that the Ford Motor Company - famous for being the first car company making the car affordable and accessible for everyone – should include the creation of novel user experiences to further distinguish the company’s position in a competitive and changing mobility landscape.
The analysis of public transport behaviour
and the current use of travel time by business commuters has revealed the potential for autonomous mobility to improve the everyday urban commuting experience. Thereby, the proposed concept introduces a radical approach for innovating the meaning of urban mobility and travel time. It envisions to transform the everyday business commute into a well-being ritual, that empowers urban citizens to dedicate their travel time to sustaining their personal well-being. The latter was found increasingly challenging due to the pressure caused by high-performance-driven societies and their fast pace lifestyle
in western cities. Hereby, the concept of mobility for well-being is further rooted in growing trends of consumers seeking for methods and activities helping them to sustainably foster what it
takes to live a happy life.
The proposed concept provides commuters with a progressive well-being experience that includes the positive effects of personal engagement
and the daily commuting routine. The proposed concept is a combination of both product and service design, that can be accessed while booking and traveling on-board an autonomous vehicle. Empathy, customizability and proactivity were given high priority during the development of the design system. Hence, an open service platform was generated that provides the customer with variable and progressive
content. In addition, affective computing and
the potential of involving machine learning was investigated with the aim to offer a more natural human-machine interaction.
The design process followed an agile approach that allowed the designer to analyse, synthesise and elaborate on genuine design solutions that would do the context justice. Hereby, the project started with a user-centred and generative research phase which was then, concluded with the identification of several opportunity spaces. From this, a clear design vison was formulated, that guided the designer in generating a pool of apt ideas. The following conceptualization phase focused on the elaboration of one design direction that revealed to become a holistic system solution. The latter was influenced by the application of various design fields, including design activities in product, service
and interaction design. In close collaboration with strategic experts, working in the field of autonomous mobility and design experts from the TU Delft, specialized in design for innovation and well-being, the designer was eager to create based on both facts and imaginative power. Subsequently, a user-centred, meaningful, radical and complex design innovation resulted. The proposed concept highlights the added value daily mobility could have for urban well-being.

This thesis researches the topic ‘embedding stakeholder needs in the creation of blockchain applications’ as part of digital strategies within the KPMG Digital Transformation department. The research resulted in a framework consisting of a digital asset and a creative session enabling KPMG consultants and clients to explore the possibilities of blockchain within their value chain. The blockchain technology has gotten more publicity over the last few. The decentralization of data in combination with an immutable ledger seems promising, but will drastically change our existing economies. It will disrupt our economy by ‘taking out the middlemen.’ As value chains will simplify, the blockchain will take over human-tasks. The aim of this research was to explore how this technology could enter our market by looking at stakeholder needs. KPMG Digital Transformation also saw an increased demand of implementing emerging technologies like blockchain. In collaboration with KPMG, the project was executed to find a structural approach for the creation of blockchain based projects. The literature review discusses, the topics design thinking, blockchain, digital transformation and the KPMG strategy. In the exploratory analysis, three analyses were executed from the perspectives of the human, technology and business similar to IDEOs three pillars of design thinking (IDEO, n.d.). From both the literature review as the exploratory analysis, insights were collected. These insights are key for the creation of blockchain applications and focus on three perspectives: technological feasibility, viability in business and human desirability. In the value proposition analysis, 80 public blockchains and 50 permissioned blockchains were analyzed on their customer values. These values were used to bridge the gap between stakeholder needs and a back-end solution such as blockchain. Answering which common blockchain values are important in the creation of a customer benefit statement if we focus on stakeholder needs. And secondly, answering how these values relate to interactions within a digital infrastructure. The tests conclude whether and how a digital infrastructure can be created using the insights (in cards) focusing on feasibility, viability and desirability. This workbook-based assignment was tested with two companies and four groups of consultants on the content and flow. Final Design The final design consists of a combination of a digital asset and the creative session design, meant for KPMG consultants to explore the value of blockchain within a digital strategy with their clients. The digital asset consists of three elements: 1. Blockchain news (on specific industries) and education. 2. A case checker: answering how interesting blockchain is for a specific case. 3. Session preparation, collecting data for the creative session. For the creative session, a workbook was designed consisting of three exploring assignments: finding stakeholder needs & values, creating a customer benefit statement and exploring cases to experience the value of blockchain in a tangible and explorative structure. The framework assesses the potential of blockchain in a certain context, simulates a discussion on its value and inspires creative thinking among KPMG consultants and its clients.

This Master thesis is written to finish the Master program Strategic Product Design in collaboration with ARS Traffic and Transport Technology (ARS T&TT). The main objective is to create a product and marketing strategy for the data warehouse department of ARS T&TT. The design process the project went through is the fuzzy front end shown in Figure 1. In the beginning the direction was fuzzy, but in the end it was a clear direction. ARS T&TT is operating in the market of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), it is building smart solutions to improve the traffic flow. The department of Data Warehousing & Sensoring (DW&S) is responsible for the data coming from stationary sensors along the road side. Currently, the market of traffic data is changing, because of the emergence of in-car data such as floating car data. Next to that, there is no established approach for development of innovative products that will meet the requirements of the evolving ITS market. Further, there exists no insightful business modelling and marketing strategy such that the corporate can unlock all the business potential of the products. DW&S started developing a data visualiser to be more pro-active and invest in the business. The product is called a Traffic Data Warehouse Cockpit (TDWC). This viewer is the starting point of this project.To create solutions in this moving market a thorough market analysis is done. The analysis focusses on the company itself, the competitors, the context in which the problem is occurring and the customers. Three future directions emerged from the analysis. The directions are: market growth for ARS T&TT, the emergence of sustainable cities and the development of the technology around autonomous vehicles. Those directions are plotted into a strategic roadmap from now till 2030. This roadmap presents the technological developments in this time period, the market trends are plotted and the product developments of ARS T&TT are presented and aligned with the market and technical developments.Two product lines were presented in the strategic roadmap and next to that also the business models fitting these product lines are created. Future scenarios are made to do an in depth business modelling analysis for the future product portfolio of the data warehouse department of ARS T&TT. Business model solutions are presented for those scenarios and also a path to change the current business model into the future models is created. In the end of the project the marketing strategy for ARS T&TT is designed. This strategy includes the marketing goals, brand positioning, brand strategy and paths to reach the goals. Figure 2 shows those marketing building blocks in a visual. The Marketing activities are visible for external parties, but the other building blocks are under the surface. The final advice how ARS T&TT should set up their marketing activities is presented in three paths to reach the marketing goals. The first pathway is to increase the visibility for the potential foreign partners by seeking for new channels. The second pathway will make ARS T&TT not only being a supplier, but next to this also an advisor to its customers (the road operators). This will build trust and the customer get to know ARS T&TT better. The third pathway is improving the focus of the communication. The current communication is focusing on the features ARS T&TT is selling, but it should change to a benefit-focused communication to attract the attention of the customers. The final advice to the ARS T&TT are written in a strategic product road map and a marketing strategy to prepare ARS T&TT for the moving mobility market in the future.

The Nubus ecosystem The Nubus ecosystem exists out of four parts, the Nubus, the endpoints, the Ki and the user is integral part of it. The Nubus ecosystem is a personal omnipresent pc, accessable via any endpoint (a type of smart device). The Nubus is the heart of the ecosystem, without the Nubus the endpoints would not function. The Nubus The Nubus is a digital personal computer provided to users as a service. It has the same digital characteristics as a normal PC without the physical characteristics. The word PC in the previous sentence includes all the devices that are smart and independently used by consumers. The Nubus is a virtual machine running on the physically server at the provider of the Nubus, which can be accessed via any endpoint with a connection. For the user the Nubus service can interpreted as an omnipresent personal computer, since the Nubus becomes accessible via the signals we are surrounded with. Every user has his/her own Nubus.The Nubus is a user specific environment in the digital realm and is attached to a persons identity and not an endpoint and is therefor accessible via any(bodies) endpoint.Access model serviceNubus is linked to a subscriber. A user pays for accessing Nubus, which includes an OS, processing power and data storage. With the subscription the user has his own personalised digital environment or Operating System that can be accessed via endpoints. The endpoints are included in the subscription and therefore users become custodians over endpoints and not owners. This makes the endpoints universal gateways to anybodies Nubus with the right authentication.Human geographic freedomThe Nubus can be accessed via anybodies endpoint to provide the ultimate human geographic freedom. Making users independent from specific device for specific data or processing power and enabling them to be independent from the geographical location of the device. Endpoints The endpoints are the successors of current devices and can be very diverse. Current devices we use can become endpoints. Cameras, phones, laptops, headphones and many more devices can become endpoints, providing users direct access to their Nubus from any endpoint.The endpoints are gateways to the Nubus. KiThe Nubus ecosystem provides an omnipresent personal computer accessable via any endpoint, the Ki enables a seamless and secure experience. The Ki enables the first step of authentication via an unobtrusive bluetooth message. Afterwards the user identifies himself to the endpoint. This enables the user to access their Nubus in a seamless an secure way over anybodies endpint and experiencing their Nubus from anywhere at any time.