Colloquia

Summary

Maars living walls, a company specialized in partitioning systems, has requested to develop a new room-in-room solution as an answer to the changing office environment. A room-in-room solution is basically a box in a box. Moreover, an enclosed space which is positioned inside a building, usually where partitioning cannot be embedded. To execute this assignment, an iterative approach was used. Every step taken was a follow-up on the previous step. The approach resulted in a roadmap which describes the steps that need to be followed to develop a configurable room-in-room solution. Simultaneously, a new room-in-room solution is developed according to the specifications gotten from Maars living walls.

The roadmap describes four phases: Research, Creation, Specification and Evaluation. If all stages are executed, a new room-in-room solution can be developed from scratch. But it is also possible to use a part of the roadmap to do smaller optimalization projects such as improving aesthetics or improving acoustic isolation. In research, there is searched for advantages and disadvantages of different products and systems, inside and outside the company, which are used to formulate a design brief. During creation are all goals and criteria specified in the design brief translated into tangible concepts. During specification are all the parts needed for the concept established, the customer journey is specified and there is made sure that the physical module and configuration function coherently. Lastly, during evaluation is evaluated both according to the design brief and to the configuration issues specified in the creation stage. There is determined if certain goals and criteria are fulfilled and elaborated on how that is executed. 

Finally, there is concluded that a new room-in-room solution is developed which fits the brand of Maars. The developed configurator is a good tool to communicate the concept. The product needs little development steps to prepare it for market introduction. The cohesion between the physical concept and the configurator do lack definition, even though there is thought of during the process. Besides the conclusion is also discussed what happened during the process of developing both the method and case-study. The steps left out are mentioned, how the method can be used if an aspect change is determined, and the different bottlenecks of the development process are established. Lastly, an outlook is described so there is known which follow-up developments can be performed according to this thesis.