What started off as a project to design a new service for the most vulnerable passenger of all: children travelling alone, became one of the most illustrative projects of what design can bring to a corporate environment. The ‘Unaccompanied Minor’ project from the Horizon 2020 PASSME project, in collaboration with KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) became a carrier for multiple research projects. The design itself was an exploration of how designers can act on a system design level, showcasing the strengths of the designers skills, as well as working in iterations on results and testing them in real operations. For KLM, the project became the showcase of how the operations could be digitized, and is being used to understand what digital transformation implies for the organization. It makes at the same time the digital strategy 20 so concrete, it can be tackled in various parts of the company. After the end of the project, we continued with the team, to investigate how we can make sure the concepts of designers can be implemented within a corporate environment, moving from abstract dreams to an actual experiential reality. During Marga’s graduation, the project was developed up to a tested MVP and is now in the planning to roll out. Being one of several projects where we undertook measure to design from a system perspective, with a focus on making it reality.

This project has been presented at the Passenger Terminal Conference in Cologne, February 2016, as well as at the Design Management Conference 2016 in Boston, August 2016. The project was an example project in the ‘Design Practice for Business’ MOOC.

This project will be reality, moving from a report and a design towards being offered to children travelling alone. It is a showcase of what the contribution of design is: holistic, designing for a system, user perspective central, taking into account all stakeholders, result driven, with an amazing affinity for technology and using all skills of a designer. The project is a combination of research and education, an example to showcase how the two can reinforce each other. It is frequently used for both research and industry purposes, is part of one of the Horizon2020 projects of the faculty: PASSME and showcases what these projects can bring for both education and research.