BlueHair: Interaction & Product Design

Tag: Sustainability

  • Accenture Digital Hackathon 2016

    AccentureDigiHack

    Last weekend I took part of Accenture’s Digital Hackathon, a global event organised by Accenture (Duh!) in which more than 400 participants from 8 cities around the globe would try to think of and complete a project within 24 hours under the umbrella theme of “Connect. Collaborate. Create”.

    It was my first time at a hackathon and although it required a lot of energy and very little sleep, it was lots of fun and quite an experience with very interesting results from all the talented people who participated. (more…)

  • Sustainable packaging? Bring out the popcorn!

    Another way of 'recycling' packing peanuts?

    For my first post of the year I received the inspiration from a Christmas present my sister received while I was visiting her.

    I’ve always had the habit of keeping the little styrofoam packing peanuts of any package I receive so that I can reuse them whenever I have to send something out myself. It saves me money and I ensure that the material is used at least once more. Sadly though, I’m sure that this is not something that everybody does and undoubtedly most of these peanuts end up in the trash after a single use, contributing to our waste problems.

    But what’s the alternative? Well, as I mentioned, my sister received this gift during the holidays which I thought was brilliantly simple and a very nicely thought alternative. It was a little box with shower and bath soaps which used POPCORN (!!!) instead of styrofoam. (more…)

  • Cradle to Cradle: Hype or hope?

    c2cI’ve been meaning to make a post about Cradle to Cradle (C2C) for a while and last week we had a mini-symposium about it at the TU Delft with the attendance of Michael Braungart, one of the original C2C advocates, so I figured that this was the perfect excuse to get down to it.
    So, to get started, let’s explain the C2C concept a little bit, and the best way to explain Cradle to Cradle is to first explain what Cradle to Grave means.

    Until not so long ago, our production paradigm was focused on manufacturing products as cheaply as possible which would be later discarded into landfills (in the worst case) or burned up for energy (in the best case), meaning that we were producing or processing materials (cradle) which would later be rendered useless because they were being buried or destroyed (grave) (more…)

  • God! you gotta love Delft

    DDEAThere’s a reason why Delft is ranked as the 15th best engineering university in the world, and god, you gotta love them for that!

    In Australia, only a crash 3 weeks before the start of the race managed to keep Nuna 5 from being the top dog of the World Solar Challenge so far… After a speedy crash recovery operation, we’re still third by the second day of racing and breathing down the neck of second placed University of Michigan. But watch out Tokai University (leaders so far) ’cause the Nuna team went to Australia to claim their rightful place and beat the competition for the 5th time in a row.

    [UPDATE: As of October 27th, Nuna 5 has already surpassed the car from the University of Michigan, so Tokai is next!]

    And back in Delft, the Design and Engineering Award is underway with some very, VERY interesting stuff going on.

    On this post, you can find a couple of my favourite videos of some of the participating projects from our different faculties, which are just to show off a bit of why Delft is soooo cool 😉 (more…)

  • World Solar Challenge: TU Delft’s ‘Nuna’ to keep the winning streak

    The World Solar Challenge is a renowned solar-powered car race run every 2 years since 1987 through the Australian outback with participants from all over the world. The TU Delft has been participating and winning every single event (kicking ass I may add) since 2001 with their car, Nuna.

    This coming October the prestigious race will be ran again and this year’s team from the TU has a big responsibility on their shoulders to try and win their 5th consecutive event. The team is already in Australia preparing for the big event and in the mean time I wanted to post a collection of cool videos from this years Nuna 5.

    Good luck to them, and I hope that they bring a new title back home!

  • The delivery of the future: From A to Green

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    I’ve been quite busy the last few weeks working on my MSc. graduation project, and so I haven’t had much time to do any new updates here, but since a while ago I found out that one of the projects I worked on had been published on the website of the European Commission for Transport, I figured that was worth a mention.

    As I’ve showed in previous posts, I worked together with a group of colleagues in a project developing a new concept for delivery trucks of the future. My posts were focusing mainly on the application of the Vision in Product Design approach (ViP), which was just but a part of the project.

    Later in the process, this vision and future product which we had designed was translated into a product that could be introduced to the market in the near future and it had a strong relation to the Civitas initiative sponsored by the European Union (more…)

  • From A to Green: A future vision of sustainable coachworks

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    Relevant Keywords:

    Automotive industry, sustainability, Transportation, Delivery, Coachworks, Future scenario

    Design Goal:

    Combigroep Carrosserieën, a Dutch coachworks producer, wants to extend its potential market following the newest regulations, transportation trends and logistics of the European Union having sustainability as a focus. As a group of 6 interdisciplinary designers the project was carried out from the strategy up to the product interaction and product detail level.

    Project duration and team:

    300 hours, 2 Strategic product designers (Stefanus Heru Prabowo, Ricardo Mejia), 3 Integral product designers (Barth Vrijling, Ana Laura Rodrigues Santos, Marjolein van Houten), 1 Interaction designer (David Güiza Caicedo).

    Methods Used:

    • Vision in Product Design (ViP) was used as a design framework throughout the whole project
    • The context of the industry and our clients position within it was researched and analyzed through stakeholder analysis, competitor analysis and PESTE analysis
    • Interviews and role playing user analysis were used to understand our users and personas were used to illustrate them during the design process.
    • Generated future scenarios
    • Creative sessions were performed to generate ideas during the design process.

    (more…)

  • Bogota: Building a Sustainable City

    [media id=10 width=600 height=450]

    I came across this video the other day, and thought that it would be interesting to publish it here too. It’s a look at Bogota (Colombia), my home town, and it’s current developments from a sustainability perspective.

    The video itself is quite interesting and it portrays the work done on the city during the past decade and how it is meant to boost Bogota towards a more sustainable future. Having experienced the city and the new infrastructure first hand, I can honestly say that the video is a bit idealized, and that not everything is as pretty (more…)