Dr. Champlin, C. J.

Carissa Champlin is an Assistant Professor of Participatory Design in the Department of Human-Centered Design at TU Delft. She researches urban toolkitting to engage a broad range of actors in the co-design of planning support tools and methods. Her research is imbedded in the Behavioural Design for Climate Action flagship project of the Climate Action Programme at TU Delft, where she facilitates researchers, practitioners and citizens in their communication about complex urban issues related to climate resilience. She is particularly interested in studying how historical low-technology and nature-based approaches can be used as guiding principles for future collective action and the use of common resources.

With gamification and co-design as hallmarks of her work, Carissa applies her toolkitting expertise to facilitate transdisciplinary research as an associated researcher of the DeSIRE programme, 4TU. Center for Resilience Engineering and member of the Resilient Delta Initiative Methodology Taskforce. Her research has been supported by subsidies and grants including Resilient Delta Initiative Methodology Pilot grant (2022), Erasmus + Grant (2021), Delft Design for Values Open Subsidy (2021) and ESS Department Seed Fund (2021).

Academic Background

Before joining Industrial Design Engineering, Carissa was a postdoctoral researcher in the Engineering Systems and Services department of Technology, Policy and Management at TU Delft. There, share served as a research lead within the 4TU. Center for Resilience Engineering and was co-led a project to create the Center’s open access education platform.

In 2019, she received her PhD from the Faculty of Engineering Technology at the University of Twente in close collaboration with the Urban and Regional Planning and Geo-Information Management department at ITC. Her doctoral research concerned the contextualization of spatial models underlying geo-information based planning support technologies (PSS) through the application of game co-design and design interventions on spatial strategy making processes. Carissa holds a professional Masters degree in Urban Management from the Berlin Institute of Technology where she was also a lecturer and researcher in Integrated Transport Planning and the Habitat Unit.