Making custom Royal Delftware affordable and fun
Royal Delft is world renowned for their Delftware; top range products like bespoke plates and 17th century tulip-vases, are painted by hand, a craft handed down from master-painter to master-painter for over 300 years. Royal Delft partnered with Hoog+Diep to create Delft Blue By Me, taking the art of producing high quality taylor made delftware to a wide audience by making it affordable, fun and quick.

A friendly self-service kiosk and innovative production process
Delft Blue By Me is a friendly self-service kiosk for creating custom Delftware. It combines a playful way of creating a personal design with an innovative production process. People use the kiosk to take a self-portrait Delftware plate or tile, or purchase postcards and other items. It takes just a few minutes from snapping a delft blue self portrait to taking the post cards from the kiosk.

While the customer instantly receives her postcards, the design and order details for the plates and tiles are taken up by a custom developed production process at the Royal Delft factory. After production the products go through delivery system and within 3 weeks a beautiful box holding the unique plate or tile arrives by mail anywhere on earth.

Developing a fun but efficient experience

The friendly efficient interaction with Delft Blue By Me, from taking a picture to receiving your plate, is the result of design iterations large and small using a variety of design and engineering skills.

Key to the friendly kiosk experience is the combination of a pleasant haptic control with the use of a ceramic plate as a display, giving the feeling of looking at the final product while creating it. Since we were creating a new customer experience, we relied heavily on the use of prototypes to test and improve our design and engineering solutions. This way we succeeded to maintain the magic of the very first mockup while reaching our goals in efficiency and robustness within time and budget.

The kiosk’s clear layout and on screen interface was created to facilitate a seamless flow from creation through product-selection to purchase. The on-screen interface picks up the projected plate design when it is created using sound to great effect to draw the users attention from the plate to the touchscreen. The on-screen product-selection is designed for exploration while the purchase section and it’s integration with the payment terminal are streamlined to guide the user quickly through the process. Each purchase ends with a printed receipt that also shows the created plate design, contributing to the rich experience and making even the receipt a memorabilia to take home.

Combining master painters and custom image processing
Hoog+Diep developed custom image processing software to turn the camera feed into delft blue plate designs and postcards using hand painted rims by Royal Delft’s master painters. In collaboration with production experts at Royal Delft the software and production facilities were fine-tuned to produce plates worthy of the Royal Delft label.