Dr. ir. Bijl-Brouwer, M. van der
Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering.
Mieke joined TU Delft in January 2019 on a Delft Technology Fellowship to develop her research activities in designing for social innovation. She is co-founder of the IDE Systemic Design Lab.
Academic Background
Mieke is a researcher, designer and educator with an interest in the practices that contribute to addressing complex societal challenges, also called âsocial innovation practicesâ. Within those practices she has a particular interest in systemic design, transdisciplinarity, design reasoning, and human-centred design.
After finishing her master in Industrial Design Engineering in Delft Mieke started her academic career in Twente as Assistant Professor where her teaching and research was focused on human-centred design practices. Her research resulted in a PhD on this topic in 2012. She then moved to Australia to learn more about how design can be used to address complex societal challenges at the Design Innovation Research Centre at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). In her role as Senior Research Fellow she worked with many public and social sector organisations to support them in their innovation processes. She developed a particular interest in challenges related to mental health and wellbeing. One of her key learnings was that even though design has the potential to contribute significantly to successfully addressing complex societal challenges, designers can only achieve this by working together with people from other organisations and disciplines, and by adjusting their practice to this new context. Mieke further learned about this idea of 'transdisciplinarity' when she moved to the UTS Transdisciplinary School, where she developed, taught in and coordinated part of the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation from 2016-2018. In 2019 she moved back to her home country the Netherlands to further explore and study the topic of Design for Social Innovation in a European context, and to contribute to the further development and delivery of the Bachelor and Master degree programs at Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft. Mieke is co-founder of the IDE systemic design lab, which is aimed at investigating the integration of design and systems thinking theory and practice towards addressing complex societal challenges.
She applies her expertise in social innovation practices to reshaping education to promote flourishing of students in various projects related to student wellbeing and more specifically to âdesigner resilienceâ with colleague Rebecca Price.
Education
- 2012
PhD, University of Twente, the Netherlands
Thesis: Exploring Usability - Design for Dynamic and Diverse Use Situations - 2001
MSc Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
Thesis: Design of a User Interface for Television for Philips Consumer Electronics.
Experience
- 2019 â Present
Associate Professor, Delft University of Technology - 2017 â 2018
Co-founder, Rad Social Design, Australia - 2016 - 2018
Senior Lecturer, University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation, Australia - 2013 - 2016
Senior Research Fellow, University of Technology Sydney, Design Innovation Research Centre, Australia - 2002 â 2013
Assistant Professor, University of Twente, Faculty of Engineering Technology, the Netherlands
Secondary employment
Adjunct Fellow - University of Technology Sydney
Involved in the research project(s):
