Delft Design Stories

From The Start: The Early Design Bird Gets The Remanufacturing Worm

The circular economy. Sustainability. Refurbishment. Remanufacturing. Recycling. We hear these buzzwords used all the time when talking about how humanity needs to lessen its impact on the planet. For her PhD research, Nina Boorsma looked into how to get companies to make more sustainable products and found that the process needs to start early.

A better environment from the comfort of your chair

A modular chair made of blocks in which CO2 has been stored and that can be converted into other pieces of furniture. With his special design - Unito - Riel Bessai, who recently graduated from the Faculty of Industrial Design, wants, above all, to tell a story. “With my chair I am making the global CO2 problem tangible and I hope to encourage people to view our consumer society from a different perspective.”

Design for Deaf culture and health

Patients failing to take their medication in the prescribed manner is a widespread problem across society. But a combination of social barriers, discrimination and difficulty with written language mean that the Deaf community has a greater struggle. This medication non-adherence can be dangerous for patients, prolong sickness and strained healthcare systems. Ph.D. researcher Prangnat Chininthorn wanted to find ways to improve this and help Deaf people better manage their own health.
Marco Rozendaal photographed in the AI factory

How do you design objects with an intention?

Designing smart objects for everyday life demands a new approach: no longer focused on a single object and a single user, but on an ecological system of countless objects and users. This approach is central in the new Delft Design Lab for Expressive Intelligence and the recently published book Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life.
Is het gewaad op dat schilderij van fluweel of van satijn?

Is the robe in that painting velvet or satin?

Staring at one of the richly drawn paintings in Amsterdam’s famous Rijksmuseum, you might recognise that the robe worn by the subject of the painting is made of velvet and the cup on the table is made of silver. Your eyes only see swirls of paint but your brain understands what the artist was depicting. As part of his thesis research, Mitchell van Zuijlen wanted to understand how this is possible.
Waarom belanden innovaties in de Vallei des Doods?

Why do innovations end up in the Valley of Death?

When it comes to innovating in large organisations, why do so many concepts die before they are realised? Barend Klitsie’s PhD research explored what organisational conditions help innovators to mitigate the Valley of Death and achieve sustainable implementation.

The Spaceman has a job for you

A cancer diagnosis is an awful and upsetting event for anyone. For the parents of young children, it is nearly unthinkable. Yet, every year, for some 35,000 families around Europe, it is a reality. PhD researcher Patrizia D'Olivo wanted to help them with her research.

Getting personal with dementia care

Caring for people with dementia is not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. That’s because people have different personalities, life experiences and preferences. Taking these things into account, Gubing Wang’s PhD explored how to facilitate designers and healthcare professionals with designing for personalised dementia care.

Delft Design Stories

Read the stories of researchers and students at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, and discover the scientific questions on which they work and the solutions they present.

Games that are always a success

After a long day at work, you somehow force yourself to go to the gym for some valuable exercise. Our sense of ‘get-up-and-go’ (thankfully) often has the upper-hand over our passive inclinations. But this does not hold true for elderly people suffering from dementia: their ability to take the initiative disappears in the early stages of the illness. With her innovative design, Hester Anderiesen Le Riche – PhD candidate at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) – helps elderly people to break out of this cycle.

Seeing, understanding and designing the light

On 31 March, Sylvia Pont held her inaugural lecture as Antoni van Leeuwenhoek professor at TU Delft. She conducts research on light and the design of light. In Sylvia Pont’s work, fundamental knowledge and applied design are woven in, out and between each other.

These days it’s all about transparency

This year marks Sicco Santema’s 25th anniversary as Professor of Marketing and Supply Management at TU Delft’s Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. Over the past quarter of a century, Santema has witnessed many changes in the field of industrial design. We shared a conversation about innovation, co-operation, and a new type of transparency which is changing everything.

Tailored Healthcare

Unfortunately, it can be a regular occurrence in the medical world: a perfectly successful operation, but a patient who is still not completely satisfied with the treatment process. Healthcare professionals are eager to improve the situation, but often have no clear image of what exactly is wrong. IDE designer Bob Groeneveld and psychologist Tessa Dekkers are working together to investigate how patient satisfaction can be improved by tailoring the care as far as possible to suit the individual patient.

Looking over Vermeer’s shoulders

In 2018, Johannes Vermeer’s world-famous Girl with a Pearl Earring underwent a total ‘body scan’: using state-of-the-art techniques, the painting was studied in painstaking detail from top to bottom. It provided a wealth of new insights about the painting and the painter. Four TU Delft faculties worked on the project.

Airplanes cross borders, so do their environmental effects

When it comes to the health effects of aviation, reducing total fuel burn may not necessarily be the optimal strategy. And, perhaps even more surprisingly, your flight from Amsterdam to Rome contributes to premature deaths in Asia. Dr. Irene Dedoussi models the global human health impact of air pollution from aviation emissions, helping both airplane designers and policy makers in weighing the various mitigation strategies to make aviation sustainable.

Autonomous robots protect the lives of emergency services in disasters

Search and rescue robots play an important role in rescue missions following disasters. Dr. Jamshidnejad is trying to make these robots even more intelligent so that they can make decisions autonomously in complex situations, thereby relieving rescue workers of life-threatening tasks and making rescue operations more efficient.