This graduation project is about digital product 121. This product is developed by 510, the data and digitalization imitative of the Netherlands Red Cross. Through 121, a person affected (PA) by a humanitarian disaster, can receive Cash Based Aid (CBA) and Information as Aid (IAA). CBA is new form of aid, where the PA receives digital money instead of traditional in-kind aid such as food or water. There are several benefits of CBA over in-kind aid. First, it can be delivered faster as the PA does not have to travel to a certain location to receive the aid, but can receive it on their digital device. Furthermore, it can be safer for PA and Aid Workers (AW) as no cash money needs to be handled. Also, it creates more autonomy for the PA on how to use the aid. And last, for AW the process is more efficient because of the digitalization. 121 is a promising product that could be used in many different humanitarian contexts. Ideally, the product can be used autonomously. Meaning that the PA can register, receive the aid, and use the digital money without additional support. However, research by 510 showed that often people cannot use the product autonomously and need additional support. This support be for example an aid worker assisting with the registration, or providing internet access for people who have no access to internet. This graduation assignment was focused on finding out, what support system functionalities might be needed, for the product 121 to function optimally. Also, the goal of the project was to show the need and relevance of this support system to external stakeholders and internal stakeholders of 510, so that the development of a support system becomes an integral part in the development of 121. A case study on undocumented migrants has been conducted, to find out what support system functionalities might be needed for that specific context. This humanitarian context was chosen, because a 121 pilot program ran from November 2020 until May 2021. During this pilot program, insights of the product in context could be gathered. Also, through an ethnographic study, insights from the end users, the undocumented migrants and aid workers have been gathered. With the insights from the case study, design requirements could be formulated, for the design of a tool to design the support system for a certain context, and to show the need and relevance for this support system. The final concept is a support system design approach consisting of four steps. The approach is accompanied with templates and a support system design canvas. This canvas has been specifically designed to facilitate problem finding and solution generation for support system functionalities. Through a creative session with 510’s team members and external stakeholders, the canvas can be filled in and the support system functionalities defined. The last step is implementing these functionalities in the further design of 121. Because, with a support system in place, more people are able to receive the aid they need.

This graduation project makes a contribution to this complex challenge by researching the question “How can NS achieve circular inflow and outflow during building, modernisation and end-of-life for the train interior, car body and bogies?”. A contribution to this challenge was made by creating a design concept for a sustainable interior side wall panel. The current panel is made of glass fibre polyester composite, which is difficult to reuse or repurpose, and cannot be recycled. The sustainable alternative is made use of recyclable aluminium honeycomb materials, and has a dismountable structure due to the use of reversible Niaga adhesive. The flat shape of the panel combined with the optimized surface distribution increase the available panel size, which increases the potential for reuse or repurpose. Additionally, the wall panel is finished through the use of coloured foil instead of paint as this reduces toxic substances and improves cleanability, readjustability and recyclability. It also gives additional customization options to the panel, such as integrating a honeycomb pattern to illustrate the circular construction.

This report also reflects on the application of design methodology by researching the question “How can design methodology be used to structure a complex design project?”. Two design methods were chosen for this: the 1:10:100 approach and the Design Roadmapping methodology. The 1:10:100 approach was chosen as this is suitable for open-ended projects. I found that the 1:10:100 method was very useful to quickly determine a project scope but it lacked structure within the ‘100’ cycle. I found the midterm and green light graduation deadlines to be useful additions to further structure the iterative process. Design Roadmapping was chosen as it combines future roadmapping and design. NS was interested in creating a roadmap towards fully circular trains, whereas the Industrial Design Engineering department was interested in my skills as concept designer. The roadmap has not been finished within the timespan of this project, but this report makes good progress along the analyses steps of this method. Additionally, I felt this method helped me to keep focus on the future instead of focusing too much on current practice.

This report describes the process and outcomes of a graduation project for the MSc program Strategic Product Design. The client organization in this project is Innovation Booster (IB). IB, founded in 2012 and located in Amsterdam, is specialized in innovation services. IB is active in segments characterized by traditional and complex organisations. IB offers Entrepreneurial Innovation which consists of three types of expertise services: Innovation Strategies, Business Innovation and Behavioural Innovation.

At the beginning of this project, IB was struggling with their client acquisition. Their sales calls were prepared ad-hoc and IB’s salespeople did not have the required knowledge about potential clients and their context. This resulted in insufficient acquisition, a too low success rate from sales calls and a too expensive and time consuming overall client acquisition process. Subsequently, growth, scalability and continuity could not be ensured. What IB needed was a tool for successful proactive acquisition that leads to high success rates. With high success rates IB could achieve a continuous flow of challenging projects required for growth, scalability and continuity. The tool should provide them the required knowledge, structure and focus for preparing sales calls. Therefore, the initial design challenge was stated as follows:
“Develop a tool for proactive client acquisition that provides the required knowledge, structure and focus for high success rates from sales calls.”

An experience workshop is designed that lets potential clients experience IB’s way of working. The process of the experience workshop is based on literature on reflection, the iterative cycle of Design Thinking and the 1-10-100 method. The experience workshop is preceded by six preparation steps and is succeeded by a follow-up step. Together, the experience workshop, its preparation and follow-up steps form a proactive approach to client acquisition. The process of this proactive client acquisition approach is based on needs of the salespeople of IB and literature on client acquisition, sales and marketing models. The proactive client acquisition approach maps out each step of client acquisition, accompanied by the goal and desired output of each step, and how to realize this output. The approach provides structure and focus in IB’s acquisition process, accompanied by pragmatic tools that support IB in realizing their acquisition goals. With the new approach, IB’s salespeople have the required knowledge about the potential client’s organisation and industry before approaching the potential clients.

The experience workshop is tested and validated with three potential clients from three different organizations through non-participant observation and semi-structured interviewing. Furthermore, the proactive client acquisition approach, including the experience workshop, is validated through a co-reflection session with four people from both the Project Management and New Business Development departments of IB. The validation study concluded that clients become impressed and enthusiastic about cooperating with IB after participating in an experience workshop. In addition, the first pilot have shown that the experience workshop leads to a less expensive and time consuming overall client acquisition process.

For a successful implementation of the proactive client acquisition approach, an internal communication and organisation plan is proposed. In this plan, the different roles and responsibilities are described that are required for a successful implementation and maintenance of the proactive client acquisition approach in the future.

As design challenges are becoming more and more complex, we aim to solve them by including an increasing variety of perspectives and opinions into the creative problem-solving process. Co-creation aims to achieve this by involving stakeholders throughout the process. Including all these different opinions makes co-creation activities increasingly complex, risking the quality of the outcome (Agueverre et al., 2020).

This thesis aims to unravel the complexity of these activities in designer-client co-creation projects. The designers targeted in this study are the designers of the consultancy Unplugged, based in Amsterdam. Unplugged aims to discover business opportunities together with their client, to take steps towards transformation. The assignment from Unplugged was to perform research into the ideation phase, as this is often experienced as difficult in practice, especially in the context of co-creation.

Through semi-structured interviews with the designers of Unplugged and several extensive literature reviews, three iterations were performed to get to the core of the complexity. The first iteration showed that the design proces, as a designer wants to perform it, is continuously disrupted. Three disrupting factors were identified: 1) the projects are stuck between design and research, 2) the client does not have a sufficient understanding of innovation, and 3) the designers do not have enough influence on the projects.

From these factors, it was concluded, in the second iteration, that there is a lack of autonomy for the designers of Unplugged. Based on this insight, an extensive literature review was conducted to discover the cause of the lack of autonomy. This literature review showed that there exists a tension between autonomy (independence) and conformity (obedience) in the context of social trusteeship (acting in the best interest of the client), or: “Do you give the client what they ask, or what they need?”

Through synthesis it was revealed that this tension is strengthened by the difference in perceived status of the respective members of the co-creation team and a misunderstanding of each other’s expertise. This difference leads to a power imbalance in which the designers have taken on a facilitating role, whereas the client takes the dominant role. Resulting in the client taking over the project and limiting the input of the designers expertise.

In the third iteration, roles are introduced for both the designer and client. These roles aim to ensure that each actors expertise is used in the correct way and at the correct time in the project by eliminating the power hierarchy in the project, through dialogue. Based on these roles, a new approach is introduced to designer-client interactions in which a rich understanding about each other’s expertise is created.

In conclusion, this thesis proposes a new approach to designer-client co-creation projects based on roles. This new approach aims to free designers from their facilitating role by creating a rich understanding between designer and client through dialogue.

Radical innovation is a critical source for creating competitive advantage and value for potential customers. However, radical innovation has inherent characteristics that make a radical innovation project difficult to manage, such as: increased generativity – the aspect that describes how radical innovation outcomes are creative and novel, different than other radical innovation outcomes, and fundamental non-probabilistic uncertainty – uncertainty inherent to radical innovation cannot be mitigated using data-driven forecasting techniques. The increased generativity and fundamental non-probabilistic uncertainty characteristics of radical innovation presents challenges especially when a decision regarding the internal adoption for further development of a radical innovation concept needs to be made, as financial tools, such as Return On Investment (ROI) and Net Present Value (NPV) are widely used to evaluate and make a decision regarding the internal adoption of radical innovation concepts. The aim of this master thesis is taking a strategic design approach to design a tool, that facilitates the decision-making process behind the internal adoption of radical innovation concepts, while addressing the knowledge gap between the challenges of radical innovation, and the decision-making tools and evaluation criteria currently used. Literature review and field research, consisting of qualitative interviews with experts from academia and experts working in industry, was conducted to understand the context of the decision-making process behind the internal adoption of radical innovation concepts. The research phase revealed the knowledge gap mentioned above and insights that were used towards devising design criteria for developing a tool. Insights gathered from the literature review and field research led to the development of the Viability Decision Canvas, a tool that facilitates the decision-making process behind the internal adoption of radical innovation concepts. The Viability Decision Canvas is based on the Viability Model which describes viability as the main decision criteria when a radical innovation concept is evaluated by a company, where viability is modeled by desirability, feasibility and suitability. Viability Decision Canvas facilitates the evaluation and the decision-making process behind the internal adoption of radical innovation concepts by employing abductive reasoning in a Fast-and-Frugal decision tree format, that addresses the non-probabilistic uncertainty inherent to radical innovation. The Viability Decision Canvas, besides the decision-maker, involves other relevant people (e.g. designer, engineer, marketer, senior manager, etc.) in the decision-making process to ensure organizational alignment. Being simple and structured, the Viability Decision Canvas allows and encourages rapid adjustment to suit the specific context of the company and the context created by the radical innovation concept generativity aspect. Critical assumptions identified during the design of the Viability Decision Canvas were validated through a test in a company context, while the usability of the Viability Decision Canvas was tested in the same company context and in a role-playing test with peers. The feedback gathered was incorporated through iterations towards the final version of the procedure. The positive results of the Viability Decision Canvas evaluation, regarding the facilitation of the decision-making process behind the internal adoption of radical innovation concepts, show the potential value of the use of the Viability Decision Canvas to be implemented as a company routine.

The current thesis explores the impact that the use of visual contracts has from the fairness perspective. The project developed in collaboration with the company Visual Contracts, a start-up specialized in Legal Design Thinking, aims to provide an added value and evidence that supports the relevance of their activity. A design process that combined research with a practical approach was the chosen approach for the development of the project. The project focused on the context of employment contracts due to its big social relevance and its potential for business opportunities. Several conflicts which seriously compromise the well-being of the parties, the employer and the employee, arise as a consequence of misunderstandings in the employment contracts. To prevent these conflicts and to offer and added value to the company Visual Contracts, the exploration of the impact of visual contracts is addressed from the fairness perspective. Three design cycles were pursued during this thesis. The first cycle, had as a goal to create an in-depth understanding of the project scope (contracts, understandability, and fairness) and to design the first visual contract. The second cycle was focused on improving the user experience and the implementability in the real context. Finally, the third cycle aimed to detail the visual contract and validate it in the real context. Along this process, a combination of desk and empirical research with the stakeholders of contracts, was conducted to gain more understanding of the scope of the project. It was also developed a framework which aimed to ease the creation of fair employment contracts and set the basis for a good relationship between the parties. Finally, one contract was designed on each cycle and afterwards tested to generate knowledge and insights for improvement. The final result iterated from an initial interactive document to a platform where the user can perform all the tasks related to their hiring and onboarding process, from reading the contract to uploading the necessary documents for the formalities. The results of the project provided the company Visual Contracts with a business opportunity in the context of employment contracts, along with evidence and tools for the further development of this project. As an overall conclusion, it was stated that the use of visual contracts contributes to fairness and generates a positive impact by improving understandability and fostering evaluation. The impact is demonstrated in the following way: visual contracts support and empower the stakeholders during the decision making process and negotiation of the agreement, they improve the relationship between the parties, by fostering trust and open communication, and finally, they prevent conflicts and set realistic expectations.

The project is in cooperation with PHYSEE. The Company provides completely transparent windows, that generate data by sensing the environment condition and convert solar power into electricity, simultaneously.
During the project, to create more values to the company, and to fulfil the personal goal of the designer, the Meaning-Driven Innovation was used in the project to look for a design solution that creates new meanings to people. Therefore, the original assignment was re-briefed to "to design a solution to access electricity and data from the PowerWindow/SmartWindow in a way that fits the current or near future scenario (1-2 years) at home or in public buildings. The solution should create new meanings to users' daily life, and therefore engage more people to use PHYSEE's products.
EESYbreeze (Figure 1), as the outcome to the assignment, provides a new meaning to the windows: Smart building skin that helps to optimise indoor environment by autonomously introducing better air for people.
To realise the proposed meaning, a Product Service System (PSS) was designed to strengthen the meaning for all the stakeholders in the project.
The main product, included in the Product Service System was further developed by designing the user experience, designing the product work-flow, and the product embodiment.
Through the evaluation with the window ventilator experts from RENSON and the iterations of prototyping, the design was proven to have the potential to be realised technically.
The user tests on the user experience and perceived air quality was suggested to be carried out for the future development.