Navigeren door onzekerheid bij het design van nieuwe technologieën: een casestudy van blockchain-toepassingen voor ecologische duurzaamheid

This dissertation examines how emerging technologies can be designed to contribute meaningfully to sustainability challenges when both the problems and the technologies themselves are marked by fundamental uncertainty. Wicked problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and water scarcity resist definitive solutions, evolve unpredictably, and involve contested values. At the same time, technologies such as blockchain are still maturing, their impacts unclear, and their affordances only partially stabilised. When these two forms of uncertainty intersect, conventional approaches that separate problem definition from solution development become inadequate. Instead, design research (DR) must embrace co-evolution, where both problems and solutions unfold together through experimentation, reflection, and adaptation. Blockchain for environmental sustainability provides the critical case. While blockchain's affordances have been hailed as transformative, most applications remain at the pilot stage, hindered by technical, regulatory, and organisational barriers. This tension between promise and reality makes blockchain a revealing lens through which to examine how design research can navigate volatile socio-technical contexts. The dissertation comprises three interrelated studies: The first is a systematic review of blockchain applications across the United Nations SDGs. It identifies dominant areas of application such as supply chain traceability, carbon markets, and resource tokenisation. It also reveals persistent barriers explaining why so few initiatives progress beyond pilot stages. The review highlights the gap between technological vision and practical impact, setting the stage for more situated design inquiry. The second study engages directly with practice through a collaboration with Botanical Water Technologies and Fujitsu Belgium. The project focused on designing a blockchain-based multi-sided platform for the sustainable trade of water. In response to the global challenge of water scarcity, six design principles were developed to provide guidance towards the design in a similar blockchain context. These principles were instantiated in a working prototype, demonstrating how blockchain's affordances can be mobilised in concrete socio-technical contexts to promote sustainability. The third study shifts focus from the artefact to the design process itself. It introduces ORCA, a set of guiding principles for navigating uncertainty in design research that foregrounds action potentials rather than fixed features. ORCA draws on lessons from the water trading project to show how researchers and practitioners can productively engage with uncertainty, turning it into a driver of creativity, collaboration, and adaptation. Taken together, the three studies advance our understanding of blockchain's potential for sustainability, provide actionable design principles for blockchain-enabled platforms, and propose a methodological orientation for design research under uncertainty. The dissertation demonstrates that uncertainty is not an obstacle to be eliminated, but a condition to be embraced and worked with. By treating blockchain as an evolving socio-technical platform rather than a fixed solution, and by allowing problems and solutions to co-evolve, design research can make a constructive contribution to the pursuit of sustainable futures.