No user win, no working system

Kyenno Scheepers

Setting the scene

We met at Anna & Max in Strijp-S on a quiet Friday afternoon, just before the Christmas break. We sat down in low lounge chairs near the window, looking out onto a calm street where only the occasional passerby broke the stillness.

The café sits on the ground floor of a building that mixes living and working. Apartments on top, offices in the middle, and on street level a pizza place, a boxing gym, and this coffee spot. On most days it is filled with laptops and people bouncing between meetings. Today, just before the Christmas break it wasn’t.

As we talked, the daylight slowly faded. By the time we stepped back outside, it was already dark.

The atmosphere was calm. We started by acknowledging it. The familiar end of year sprint, the pressure to wrap everything up before Christmas, and that shared moment when people collectively decide they have done enough for the year. It felt like most of the city had already reached that point.

A good setting for a conversation that didn’t *rush*.

What he does

Kyenno Scheepers is a PhD candidate at TU Delft, researching Reusable Packaging Systems Innovation and Design. His work sits at the intersection of sustainability, design, logistics, and human behavior. Not just how packaging should work in theory, but how entire systems behave once they meet real users, real incentives, and real constraints. It is a topic that is not only interesting, but one that will likely change what we find in supermarkets in the future.

Outside of this complex research topic, we also geeked out on video games, building PCs, rising hardware prices, and our latest insights on AI and how to apply it effectively.

What we talked about

When reuse backfires

One example Kyenno shared stuck with me. In the past, some PET bottles were designed to be robust enough to refill many times. They worked so well that people started using them far beyond their original purpose. Storing petrol, mixing fertilizer, all kinds of secondary uses. The problem is that when one of those bottles re-enters the reuse stream, it can contaminate the entire batch. One wrong bottle is enough to ruin everything.

Ironically, this is where today’s PET recycling system performs better. Bottles are intentionally more flimsy. Not because it is worse design, but because it is focused design. They are good at exactly one thing. Packaging beverages. They are lightweight to transport and easy to collect, and the recycling system for PET appears to perform relatively well, partly because of its monomaterial nature and the wide range of products that recycled PET can be used for. Sometimes designing against unintended use is what makes a system resilient.

Designing behavior is harder than designing materials

We talked about why reusable packaging systems struggle in practice. Plastics are confusing. To most people, plastic looks like plastic. Plastic is not always bad, but it is often perceived that way because different plastics are hard to tell apart. Separating materials correctly is difficult, especially when food packaging comes in many shapes, layers, and combinations. PET bottles work relatively well because they are standardized. Most other food packaging is not.

Glass often comes up as an alternative. Chemically stable and endlessly recyclable. But then reality enters. Glass shatters. One broken container in a filling line can stop an entire factory. Everything needs to be cleaned to avoid shipping sharp fragments. Nobody wants to finding a piece of glass in their food. Every material choice solves one problem and introduces another. Users do not think in material science terms. They think in safety, convenience, and effort.

The user win is the system win

We talked about supermarkets, regulation, and where meaningful change might realistically come from. Kyenno is reaching out to supermarkets, but it is still early. Regulation can force compliance, but it rarely creates preference. Preference comes from a clear win for the user.

One angle we discussed was time. It can be noticed that people increasingly value time and convenience, where people once spent much longer preparing food. If reusable packaging saves time rather than adding friction, it becomes attractive. Not because it is sustainable, but because it fits people’s lives.

Another potential lever is freshness. If packaging keeps food fresh longer, fewer spoiled vegetables, fewer forgotten leftovers, that benefit is felt immediately. Less waste in the fridge matters to people long before abstract environmental impact does.

If users prefer the solution, supermarkets benefit too. Preference drives adoption. Adoption makes systems viable. Sustainability follows.

Designers, optimism, and a touch of ADHD

At some point, Kyenno made a remark that instantly clicked. Designers all seem to have a bit of ADHD. New ideas start broken, incomplete, and easy to dismiss. Without optimism, a willingness to protect and keep on putting energy into fragile ideas, nothing new survives long enough to improve.

We talked about that shared urge to really understand how things work, and the frustration of not being able to let something go until you do. And also the flip side. Once you fully understand the mechanism, curiosity fades and attention moves on to the next thing. That *restless* curiosity can be uncomfortable. But in complex systems, it is often exactly what allows designers to connect dots across disciplines instead of staying safely within one lane.

Reflections

Designing systems still starts with the user

No matter how advanced a system is, reusable, circular, or cost efficient, it only works if the user clearly wins. Time saved. Food kept fresh longer. Less effort. Miss that, and the rest of the system never gets a chance to succeed.

Optimism is a design skill

That playful comment about ADHD stuck with me. New ideas need protection before they earn their place. Optimism, curiosity, and a willingness to sit with incomplete thoughts are not weaknesses. They are what allow ideas to survive long enough to become real.

What doesn’t work matters just as much as what does

Scientific research has its place. Papers create structure and shared understanding. But they rarely capture failed ideas and dead ends. If you want to design something new, that missing knowledge is crucial. You only find it by talking to people in the field, testing assumptions, and watching ideas break. Not everything worth knowing is written down. Some things you only *learn* by building, or by paying attention to where systems fail.