Today, an increasing number of art, history, and culture-related items are being digitally reproduced and displayed by cultural heritage institutions on websites. As the digitisation of cultural collections progresses, digital collection websites are reaching a broader and more diverse audience, including a growing segment known as casual users. This user group is becoming more prevalent in the context of digital collections. However, despite their increasing presence, the current interfaces of most digital collection websites do not adequately support the casual user experience. Casual users typically visit these sites without a specific informational goal, preferring exploratory browsing. In contrast, many existing interfaces are designed for users with clear motivations, focusing on targeted searches. Tools like search bars and catalogues may limit exploration for casual users, who may feel less encouraged to explore freely. This raises a critical question: how can we design an innovative exploration experience that invites casual users to explore and supports their divergent exploration?

Through a literature review of psychological theories on exploratory behaviour, design principles for supporting casual users, theories on facilitating serendipity, and user research with six casual users, a deeper understanding of the context was gained, leading to the definition of the design goal. Four interaction qualities—exploratory, serendipitous, supportive, and playful—were then established as guiding principles for the project.

Based on the research findings, four initial concepts were developed and tested with nine participants. Insights from the first round of testing were used to formulate an integrated concept. An interactive prototype was then created to conduct a second round of testing with five participants.

The final concept, Wander More, is an innovative online tool for exploring digital collections. It is designed to invite casual users to wander through diverse cultural items using connected keywords in a simple, playful, and surprising way. The key features of the final concept are as follows:

1. Wandering through various items via keyword connections in a simple and endless way.
2. Playfully dragging keywords to generate a diverse range of surprising items.
3. Viewing exploration journey summary
4. Also supporting deep and specific exploration

In the final evaluation, the design was assessed to determine how well it achieved the design goal. Five participants found it to be a simple and enjoyable experience that allowed them to explore diverse items in a playful and surprising manner.

The public's participation in scientific research is increasing (Shirk et al., 2012), and citizen science is being used more in the context of museums. These museums want a deeper engagement with their volunteers, and a way to do so is to involve them in citizen science projects. This project aims to support the co-creation and execution of a citizen science project with volunteers and museum researchers by lowering the barriers for volunteers to join and by helping them formulate a research question that is suitable for a museum's citizen science project.
The project began with a background study, exploring the theory of citizen science and volunteering. More extensive research is done to discover how this theory translates into practice. This research was focused on finding answers to the following questions: Who are the volunteers that are involved in citizen science projects, what motivates them, what does a citizen science project look like in a museum, and who are involved and what are their roles? Finding these answers is done by conducting interviews with experts and volunteers and sharing a questionnaire that is focussed on the motivation of volunteers.
Insights from this research highlighted several topics that influence these citizen science projects. Project leaders of citizen science projects expressed that they see the goal of a project to allow the volunteers to become their own researchers, to ask their own questions, and to drive their own way forward. And focus on involving the volunteers earlier in the process so you can create a citizen science project together. A data scientist in a citizen science project said that she recommends a closer collaboration between the volunteer and the scientist.
Based on these findings, the final design solution was developed: An online research assistant that supports the volunteers that want to start a citizen science project with the museum. The tool guides the volunteers in identifying a topic they are are enthusiastic about and helps them formulate a research question that aligns with this topic and that fits within the museum goals. This results in a good starting point for them to pitch their ideas to the museum researcher. It helps them feel more in control of a project by making them an active part of its creation. For the museum, this results in a new citizen science project that fits within the volunteer project. This is how they get the most out of the skills and interests of the volunteers that are involved.
This project shows a tool that can ultimately help volunteers and museum researchers create a citizen science project together, creating citizen science projects where the citizens are fully participating. Further research can focus on how this tool can be applied in other research areas as well, which can provide valuable insights into the applicability and impact of volunteers in scientific research.

While most mobility providers likely have a sustainable or environmentally friendly goal at heart, a poor implementation strategy can do more harm than good within a city. The lack of awareness about the city’s environmental, socio-demographic or socio-economic characteristics or the absence of a clear vision of the local government about how to deal with new mobility providers plays a crucial role in this. The design of a new tool called ‘cityzona’ can aid in creating a better connection between local government and mobility provider by making urban planners and/or designers more aware of the relations between variables influencing the modal split but also by improving the communication about the city between stakeholders. This paper aims to take the first steps in the development of the cityzona by designing early versions of the cityzona in an iterative process. For the design of the cityzona quantitative data is used in combination with semi-structured interviews. The results are qualitatively interpreted for the creation of the cityzona concept. Interviews showed that the cityzona has potential to function as a tool to align stakeholders for the design of a long-term mobility strategy as well as a tool for exploring and reinventing city level services for the implementation in different types of cities. Regardless of the function, the cityzona provided most useful in the early stages of a design process. However, more research is needed on the use of cityzonas in practice to further validate the fit with these potential functions.

The Nederlands Fotomuseum is the Dutch national museum for photography and its archive has the biggest collection of photographic material in the country. Currently, the visitors of the museum have a rather passive role and are merely subjected to the visual artworks in the museum. The museum desires to give the visitors more insight in the world behind photography, such as the photographic process, the invention and developments of the photo camera or the process of developing photographs in the dark room. This project explores the possibilities to let the visitors of the Nederlands Fotomuseum experience the world behind photography in an active, co-participatory way. First an analysis of the context is made: The museum’s vision, goals and ways of working. The way other museums handle interactive, educative installations. The desires of the visitors and motivation for coming. The way photographers work and what they desire. The principles of the photo camera. This is followed by an exploration of three promising scopes. Resulting from the analysis, the design goal is re-defined as: “Design an educational interactive experience for the visitor of the Nederlands Fotomuseum with a rechargers motive and no experience with photography. This experience needs to make this target group take a longer and better educated look at photographs to let them experience what it is like to be a photographer and what it takes to make a photograph”. The developing stage shows the creative process towards coming up with a design proposal fulfilling the design goal and meeting the requirements. This is done through a process of ideation, conceptualization and validation. Next, the design proposal is given, consisting of a presentation of the total design, an explanation of the envisioned co-participatory interaction, and a more detailed design of the mechanical part of the design proposal. Finally, the project is concluded by evaluating the design proposal on the requirements, discussing the feasibility, desirability and viability, and posing the recommendations for further research and development.

This thesis describes the design process to enhance the music festival experience for hearing-impaired people. This assignment was set up to make the MOJO backstage exhibition at Museum Prinsenhof Delft inclusive for hearing-impaired people. First, context mapping research with hearing-impaired and hearing festival visitors shows that inclusiveness at festivals is less present for hearing-impaired. To include hearing-impaired, the focus is to minimize the language barrier and create an independent and equal interaction. Combining the mapping information with desktop research and a sensitizing experiment, resulted in socio-cultural dimension diagrams (Hofstede, 2018) which compare hearing and deaf cultures. Differences conclude that deaf culture is more together, emotionally expressive and contextual. With music experience being one of the main reasons for people to visit festivals, for hearing impaired this is experienced through vibrations, live performances and dancing audiences during a music festival. In current products and theories music characteristics are often literally translated to structures of the tactile and/or visual sense, because they are capable to change over time and have a wide variety. Unfortunately, most of these abstract theories and products are not able to convey the same emotional response as people who hear songs via sound. Therefore, a test with hearing people was performed to find similarities in emotional response to music of hearing and hearing-impaired people. Hearing people were asked to elaborate on Justlin and Vastfall’s (2008) emotional responses to music. Similarities between the answers given in this test and interviews with hearing-impaired, were found within two of the categories; emotional contagion and rhythmic entrainment. During interviews and observations at several festivals, using current solutions like the Lofelt bracelet and signdance shows. It was discovered that rhythmic entrainment is experienced by hearing-impaired people by feeling bass through vibrations of speakers or floors. Emotional contagion is experienced by dance moves and facial expression of a crowd or performers on stage. The goal of this study is to design a product that uses visual dance and vibrations of the bass as means to create an inclusive interaction between hearing-impaired and hearing festival visitors. This is done by an interactive dance game that is played during a live concert. The game is played by mimicking dance moves on the beat, while the beat is felt by vibrations of the bass. A concept test concluded that the game is inclusive because it was played just as well by hearing as hearing-impaired people. Also, bystanders joined the dance game without being an actual participant. This effect is expected to be even bigger in the festival context. Hearing-impaired people mention to feel more independent and confident at a festival when using a product like this. It would be interesting to develop a portable (smartphone) version to be independent of a location. Further research could be done to develop the character into a fully automated (sign) dance character which would make hearing-impaired fully independent of their peers at every location in time.