In recent years, we have become increasingly aware of the vast impact of the fast fashion and textile industry. Over the years the fashion industry has been abundantly criticised over its limited consideration of social and environmental issues and the widespread impact that these have. By now, textile creation itself has a larger carbon footprint than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. The biggest change can be made within the creation of these textiles. This is where Byborre and the Window of Textile opportunities (WoTO) come into play.
This project is executed in collaboration with Byborre: a frontrunner in creating transparent and responsible textiles and trying to change the way the textile industry operates. As part of their mission they launched WoTO: a platform and exposition that connects Byborre’s transparent textile supply-chain in order to collaboratively solve the industry’s sustainability challenges and aims to educate on responsible textile creation and use. This raised the following question that served as the kick-off for the project:
“How can WoTO educate, inspire and connect textile users, academic and industry professionals in order to drive collaborative, transparent and responsible textile innovation and creation?”
In order to find out, the project took a user-centred approach: the user’s perspective is leading in order to gain insight. User research consisting out of qualitative interviews, user-journeys and persona’s along with literature research on open and networked innovations was performed. The analysis of this research phase shows the complexity of interdisciplinary collaboration and the problems that users experience within WoTO:
The concept of WoTO lacks clarity, resulting in different interpretations and expectations of the platform. The network partners experience a lack of guidance, facilitation and moderation which makes it hard to keep overview and manage expectations. Due to a lack of, - or unsuitable collaborative systems and tools it becomes challenging for the partners to stay involved, connected and aligned. This consequently results in an unclear narrative for the visitors.
Based on ideation, co-creation and evaluation with stakeholders a service design vision for WoTO is created to alleviate this problem:
The service design offers WoTO partners an accessible way to engage with the Window of Textile Opportunities and stimulates and facilitates interdisciplinary working and communication within, and outside of the WoTO network. Decreasing the gap between the textile supply-chain and brands/consumers. By doing so aiming to strengthen WoTO’s primary functions: to forge interdisciplinary connections & educate on responsible creation and transparency.
It does so by offering guidance, orchestration and structure through various touch-points that support the the newly constructed collaborative model and user flow. These touch-points can be attributed to four themes:

Stimulate engagement
Create uniformity in collaboration
Guide towards alignment and change
Decrease the gap between the supply-chain and brands/consumers

To implement the service successfully a roadmap is given to help prioritise activities for the short term implementation. In order to make this possible it is recommended to further develop and test the service and keep the partners involved in this process.
Ultimately, active partner orchestration and community management is essential to WoTO’s operations and interdisciplinary work. If not performed, partners can’t align and the service won’t be able facilitate its purpose.

Recently, Deloitte, Nibud and ING conducted a study on financial health in the Netherlands. As a next step, the involved parties have taken the initiative by creating the Financial Health Index (FHI), a tool to measure people’s financial health via fifteen questions. Deloitte is searching for new channels that they could use to stimulate the usage of the FHI and other initiatives that could create a positive impact on the financial health of the Netherlands. The retail channel is an important financial health channel were customers make the actual financial spending decisions, and could therefore be a promising new direction. This lead to the initial research question of this project: ““Is the retail channel a feasible and impactful way to reach end-users for the FHI, in order to help them improve their financial health?“

Because of the newness and abstractness of the topic, a qualitative research study was conducted. Nine highly experienced professionals in the retail industry were interviewed, giving an understanding of retailers attitude concerning customers’ financial health, as well as a possible implementation of the FHI and other interesting initiatives. This showed that in order for retailers to contribute, the FHI might not be the best solution, mainly due to the privacy constraints, the lack of use cases and missing business case. It was found that in order to get retailers to contribute, it might be better to offer more generic financial health solutions, that do not include the profiling of customers.

Other existing initiatives were identified and analyzed, in the financial health domains “to loan”, “saving”, “spending”, “income” and “planning”. After a selection process and re-clustering, interesting clusters appeared. The requirements and wishes gained through the research showed that the area of “saving” seemed most promising to leverage the retail channel to improve customers’ financial health. In order to generate the biggest impact, it was chosen to focus on a retail saving program for Christmas, as “a lot of Dutch citizens struggle with financial health which increases in January, because they are not prepared for the extra retail expenses in December”. This was the problem statement starting the design phase.

In the design phase, a research into the simulation of saving behavior was done. Next, two design iterations were conducted. The first iteration included a user research, through two user questionnaires. The second iteration included co-creation sessions with retailers. The focus of the design phase was on gaining insights into the options and best solutions for the four most important design choices for the retail saving program. These were the “saving goal”, “user journey channel”, “business model” and “user saving process”.

The outcome is the “CareFree Christmas” initiative. This initiative allows customers to save for a specific retail product, while gaining a reward for their positive financial healthy saving behaviour. For retailers, this allows them to create a social impact by helping customers with their financial health, while at the same time increasing customer loyalty, purchase guarantee and a better cashflow.

In 2020 our lives have been turned upside down by the outbreak of COVID-19. Working from home became the new standard, forcing the whole world into the biggest remote working experiment ever. The already existing remote working trend caught wind and changed the future of work to hybrid working in an office ecosystem. With a large number of companies and employees being inexperienced with hybrid working, new challenges and unfulfilled needs came to light. Literature research and more than 50 interviews with people from 31 companies were done to identify these challenges and develop a deep understanding of them. The three problem categories are asymmetrical communication, disconnected office ecosystem and unprepared companies. The decision was made to focus on asymmetrical communication in hybrid meetings. Hybrid meetings are meetings with both online and in-office participants. These types of meetings make the online participants feel invaluable. This is caused by them not feeling involved and struggling to give input. In the long term this can lead to a decrease in employee satisfaction. Communication science helps explain why hybrid communication is hard, especially for the remote attendees. We humans collect countless information points from each other, which we unconsciously process and use for smooth and natural conversation. With video communication crucial information is filtered out, with eye contact and (selective) gaze, body language and life-sized scale being the most impactful ones. The goal of the project is to develop a product that enriches hybrid communication by supporting previously lost information. The technology developed in the design phase is coined artificial eye contact, which is based on the science of eye contact and selective gaze. Through validation experiments artificial eye contact was found to be successful in establishing similar effects. These effects are involvement, group dynamics, trust and convincement for eye contact, and more attention towards online participants, better group dynamics and a higher turn taking frequency for selective gaze. The retail price is 300 euros, but an additional data driven dashboard with a subscription model will still be validated. The product will form the foundation for a Startup, called Be There, with the mission of enabling natural and equal communication between meeting participants from different locations in the office ecosystem. Raising capital and patenting the technology are the next steps in the company planning. To conclude the project, validate the problem solution fit and partially validate the product market fit a pilot was done with Delta Capita, a technology consultancy from Amsterdam. The Be There One proved its value and collected the first Letter of Intent.

A strategy for Quooker to change its business model from offering a product to offering an outcome.