Jose Martínez Castro is IDE’s 7500th graduate!

Nieuws - 07 oktober 2021 - Communication

On Friday (1 October), the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering celebrated its 7500th graduate!

It is a milestone that our faculty, staff and students alike, can be proud of. Not only does it remind us that we've equipped 7500 graduates (and counting) with the competencies and tools they need to design for complexity. But as the graduation was held on campus, it was a reminder that life at IDE is carefully, but surely returning back to normal.

What’s more, it was a joy to surprise Jose Martínez Castro with the exciting news and congratulate him on graduating cum laude in the Integrated Product Design (IPD) Master's programme. We look forward to seeing how he evolves as an industrial designer.

From left to right: Ena Voûte, Alice Buso, Jose Martínez Castro, Elvin Karana, Arjen Jansen and Jun Wu

My time as an industrial design student at TU Delft has allowed me to combine my passion for design with my technical background as a mechanical engineer. With my master thesis project, I merged both of these worlds by applying advanced prototyping and computational tools that can help other designers to better understand the material experience of livingness in shape-changing interfaces. I am honoured to be the 7500th graduate of this faculty. IDE has been a source of inspiration and support during the last two years, thanks to the influence of all my ambitious peers and innovative professors.

Jose Martínez Castro (TU Delft alumnus)

When asked about his graduation project, Professor Elvin Karana, tenured Assistant Professor Jun Wu, and PhD candidate Alice Buso (chair and mentors, respectively, of Jose’s project) had this to say:

“The definition of materials in design is more extensive than ever. Materials can possess living-like properties, they sense and adapt through computational and biological programmability. How should designers work with such animated materials? What new skills and competencies do they need?

Jose’s graduation project taps into this exciting field of animated materials, with a particular focus on textiles. He introduces Textalive: The Animated Textile Toolkit, a 3D printed textile composite and digital support tool to explore shape-changing interfaces and alive-like expressions in material-driven design. The toolkit uses accessible 3D printed pneumatic actuators that can be arranged along a 3D printed textile composite to create a variety of shape morphologies.

The hardware allows designers to control the kinetic parameters of the movement of the textile to create different expressions. Additionally, the computational design tool allows simulating, hence predicting, the shape and movement of the textile by digitally varying the location of the actuator. Jose validated his toolkit with various designers showing its potential as a design tool for easily exploring shape-changing interfaces and alive-like expressions.”

Jose Martínez Castro
Jose Martínez Castro
Jose Martínez Castro
Jose Martínez Castro