Deze casestudie geeft inzicht in verschillende soorten kennis die kenmerkend zijn voor applied design research. Er wordt onderscheid gemaakt tussen kennis over de huidige situatie, over wenselijke alternatieven en over effectieve oplossingen om daar te komen. Ofwel, kennis hoe het is, kennis over hoe het kan zijn en kennis over hoe het zal zijn als we effectieve oplossingen toepassen. Elk van deze soorten kennis heeft andere kwaliteitscriteria.
Closing the loop of products and materials in Product Service Systems (PSS) can be approached by designers in several ways. One promising strategy is to invoke a greater sense of ownership of the products and materials that are used within a PSS. To develop and evaluate a design tool in the context of PSS, our case study focused on a bicycle sharing service. The central question was whether and how designers can be supported with a design tool, based on psychological ownership, to involve users in closing the loop activities. We developed a PSS design tool based on psychological ownership literature and implemented it in a range of design iterations. This resulted in ten design proposals and two implemented design interventions. To evaluate the design tool, 42 project members were interviewed about their design process. The design interventions were evaluated through site visits, an interview with the bicycle repairer responsible, and nine users of the bicycle service. We conclude that a psychological ownership-based design tool shows potential to contribute to closing the resource loop by allowing end users and service provider of PSS to collaborate on repair and maintenance activities. Our evaluation resulted in suggestions for revising the psychological ownership design tool, including adding ‘Giving Feedback’ to the list of affordances, prioritizing ‘Enabling’ and ‘Simplification’ over others and recognize a reciprocal relationship between service provider and service user when closing the loop activities.
This investigation explores relations between 1) a theory of human cognition, called Embodied Cognition, 2) the design of interactive systems and 3) the practice of ‘creative group meetings’ (of which the so-called ‘brainstorm’ is perhaps the best-known example). The investigation is one of Research-through-Design (Overbeeke et al., 2006). This means that, together with students and external stakeholders, I designed two interactive prototypes. Both systems contain a ‘mix’ of both physical and digital forms. Both are designed to be tools in creative meeting sessions, or brainstorms. The tools are meant to form a natural, element in the physical meeting space. The function of these devices is to support the formation of shared insight: that is, the tools should support the process by which participants together, during the activity, get a better grip on the design challenge that they are faced with. Over a series of iterations I reflected on the design process and outcome, and investigated how users interacted with the prototypes.
Cross-Re-Tour supports European tourism SME while implementing digital and circular economy innovations. The three year project promotes uptake and replication by tourism SMEs of tools and solutions developed in other sectors, to mainstream green and circular tourism business operations.At the start of the project existing knowledge-gaps of tourism SMEs will be researched through online dialogues. This will be followed by a market scan, an overview of existing state of the art solutions to digital and green constraints in other economic sectors, which may be applied to tourism SME business operations: water, energy, food, plastic, transport and furniture /equipment. The scan identifies best practices from other sectors related to nudging of clients towards sustainable behaviour and nudging of staff on how to best engage with new tourism market segments.The next stage of the project relates to two design processes: an online diagnostic tool that allows for measuring and assessing (160) SME’s potential to adapt existing solutions in digital and green challenges, developed in other economic sectors. Next to this, a knowledge hub, addresses knowledge constraints and proposes solutions, business advisory services, training activities to SMEs participating. The hub acts as a matchmaker, bringing together 160 tourism SMEs searching for solutions, with suppliers of existing solutions developed in other sectors. The next key activity is a cross-domain open innovation programme, that will provide 80 tourism SMEs with financial support (up to EUR 30K). Examples of partnerships could be: a hotel and a supplier of refurbished matrasses for hospitals; a restaurant and a supplier of food rejected by supermarkets, a dance event organiser and a supplier of refurbished water bottles operating in the cruise industry, etc.The 80 cross-domain partnerships will be supported through the knowledge hub and their business innovation advisors. The goal is to develop a variety of innovative partnerships to assure that examples in all operational levels of tourism SMEs.The innovation projects shall be presented during a show-and-share event, combined with an investors’ pitch. The diagnostic tool, market scan, knowledge hub, as well as the show and share offer excellent opportunities to communicate results and possible impact of open innovation processes to a wider international audience of destination stakeholders and non-tourism partners. Societal issueSupporting the implementation of digital and circular economy solutions in tourism SMEs is key for its transition towards sustainable low-impact industry and society. Benefit for societySolutions are already developed in other sectors but the cross-over towards tourism is not happening. The project bridges this gap.
The projectThe overarching goal of DIGNITY, DIGital traNsport In and for socieTY, is to foster a sustainable, integrated and user-friendly digital travel eco-system that improves accessibility and social inclusion, along with the travel experience and daily life of all citizens. The project delves into the digital transport eco-system to grasp the full range of factors that might lead to disparities in the uptake of digitalised mobility solutions by different user groups in Europe. Analysing the digital transition from both a user and provider’s perspective, DIGNITY looks at the challenges brought about by digitalisation, to then design, test and validate the DIGNITY approach, a novel concept that seeks to become the ‘ABCs for a digital inclusive travel system’. The approach combines proven inclusive design methodologies with the principles of foresight analysis to examine how a structured involvement of all actors – local institutions, market players, interest groups and end users – can help bridge the digital gap by co-creating more inclusive mobility solutions and by formulating user-centred policy frameworks.The objectivesThe idea is to support public and private mobility providers in conceiving mainstream digital products or services that are accessible to and usable by as many people as possible, regardless of their income, social situation or age; and to help policy makers formulate long-term strategies that promote innovation in transport while responding to global social, demographic and economic changes, including the challenges of poverty and migration.The missionBy focusing on and involving end-users throughout the process of designing policies, products, or services, it is possible to reduce social exclusion while boosting new business models and social innovation. The end result that DIGNITY is aiming for is an innovative decision support tool that can help local and regional decision-makers formulate digitally inclusive policies and strategies, and digital providers design more inclusive products and services.The approachThe DIGNITY approach combines analysis with concrete actions to make digital mobility services inclusive over the long term. The approach connects users’ needs and requirements with the provision of mobility services, and at the same time connects those services to the institutional framework. It is a multi-phase process that first seeks to understand and bridge the digital gap, and then to test, evaluate and fine-tune the approach, so that it can be applied in other contexts even after the project’s end.Partners: ISINNOVA (Italy), Mobiel 21 (Belgium), Universitat Politechnica deCatalunya Spain), IZT (Germany), University of Cambridge (UK), Factualconsulting (Spain), Barcelona Regional Agencia (Spain), City of Tilburg(Netherlands), Nextbike (Germany), City of Ancona (Italy), MyCicero (Italy),Conerobus (Italy), Vlaams Gewest (Belgium)
The scientific publishing industry is rapidly transitioning towards information analytics. This shift is disproportionately benefiting large companies. These can afford to deploy digital technologies like knowledge graphs that can index their contents and create advanced search engines. Small and medium publishing enterprises, instead, often lack the resources to fully embrace such digital transformations. This divide is acutely felt in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Scholars from these disciplines are largely unable to benefit from modern scientific search engines, because their publishing ecosystem is made of many specialized businesses which cannot, individually, develop comparable services. We propose to start bridging this gap by democratizing access to knowledge graphs – the technology underpinning modern scientific search engines – for small and medium publishers in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Their contents, largely made of books, already contain rich, structured information – such as references and indexes – which can be automatically mined and interlinked. We plan to develop a framework for extracting structured information and create knowledge graphs from it. We will as much as possible consolidate existing proven technologies into a single codebase, instead of reinventing the wheel. Our consortium is a collaboration of researchers in scientific information mining, Odoma, an AI consulting company, and the publisher Brill, sharing its data and expertise. Brill will be able to immediately put to use the project results to improve its internal processes and services. Furthermore, our results will be published in open source with a commercial-friendly license, in order to foster the adoption and future development of the framework by other publishers. Ultimately, our proposal is an example of industry innovation where, instead of scaling-up, we scale wide by creating a common resource which many small players can then use and expand upon.
