News

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.

First sector portrait for design engineering sciences presented to Ministry of Education, Culture and Science

IDE MSc Integrated Product Design alumna Tina Ekhtiar’s project Wavy took home the Student Runner Up Interaction Award at the Core77 Design Awards 2021.

Healthy Start is a new scientific initiative by Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus MC, and TU Delft. It is led by IDE professor Maaike Kleinsmann, Eveline Crone (Erasmus University), and Vincent Jaddoe (Erasmus MC). The project aims to help children and young adults who face unequal starting points and live in the Rotterdam-Delft area. Healthy Start aims to create developmental opportunities for new generations by using innovative medical, social, behavioural, and technical approaches.

When COVID-19 hit, the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, along with the rest of TU Delft and beyond underwent a major transformation. Staff and students were forced to leave on-campus education behind, instead being given the task of traversing the complex landscape of online education.

We know we’re showing up to this party a little late, but we would still like to congratulate all the winners of this year’s Pluim Awards! Keep reading to find out who took home an award.

TU Delft has been selected as a partner of the New European Bauhaus, a think-do tank initiated by the President of the European Commission.

The way we have designed society's mobility options are hurting the planet and us. Just look at traffic jams, pollution, and the inequality or exclusion it causes within vulnerable populations. We talk and think about mobility in a language and through a narrative that has been fixed for decades. It’s time we started designing a new narrative for the relationship between mobility and society.

IDE’s Professor of Post-industrial Design, Elisa Giaccardi, will join the Board of Associate Editors of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) as a result of her important theoretical and empirical contributions in design theory and practice. As a newly appointed Associate Editor, she will contribute to the HCI board by taking responsibility for handling the journal's increasing submissions in design research on topics such as human-algorithm interaction and responsible AI.

How to design successful tech products? Browse the design strategies in this new book by Deborah Nas.

It makes sense that designing for a circular economy requires something different than the traditional linear approach. Because it’s not just about creating sustainable products, it’s about an entire system aimed at reducing resource use and waste. For her PhD research, Deborah Sumter wanted to find out what competencies designers need to develop to be successful at circular design.

Congratulations to IDE’s Assistant Professor of Transition Design, Rebecca Price. Together with René van der Velde from the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Rebecca has been granted €800,000 in funding for research on urban forestry as a means to building more climate and bio-resilient cities.

Every year IDE, alongside many of the other faculties and organisations, supports a number of TU Delft’s Student Teams. Each team is made up of motivated, highly skilled students, who are responsible for everything from team management to the design and production of their inventions.

If you see a bunch of grapes, how does your brain understand that those are real grapes and not ones made of plastic? And if you see those grapes in a painting - say a 17th-century piece of Dutch Golden Age art - how does your brain understand that those are also grapes? That’s what Francesca Di Cicco wanted to know for her PhD thesis.

The toilet touches all our lives, but we don’t want to touch the toilet. In other words, we try to keep a distance from toilets, particularly those in public. However, these toilets are what makes it possible for us to leave our homes and travel. More specifically, anyone travelling by train is used to having free access to train toilets, certainly on long journeys. But, as they are perceived as being dirty, they are greatly underused. A dilemma for railway companies and a challenge for sanitary designer and PhD graduate Marian Loth.

Researchers led by Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) used 3D printing to create a novel, environmentally-friendly and living material made of algae that has many potential applications.

Elsbeth de Korte isn’t your typical Ph.D. student. When she defends her thesis later this month, on how technology can improve health and well-being in the workplace, she will have already been working at the Dutch research institute TNO for more than twenty years.

The 32nd Annual Conference of the European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics takes place (virtually) from 26-29 April 2021. This year IDE professor Elisa Giaccardi will open the conference with a keynote on "Autonomous Technologies and the Challenges of Probabilistic Design”.

What makes good scientific output? The conventional answer might be results, papers, and publications. But there’s growing recognition for other forms of output too – not least science communication. This year the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has introduced a pilot scheme to recognise and reward scientists active in science communication – including those from IDE.

As IDE alumni you are experts in what it’s like to design for the real world. We want to bring your perspective into the renewed bachelor programme, shrinking the gap between education theory and design in practice. Interested in getting involved?

What is the role of design in our rapidly changing world? What will the designer of tomorrow need to succeed? Just some of the questions posed while re-designing IDE’s bachelor programme due to launch this August.

The EIT Health's postgraduate programme BENEFIT Health Innovation Fellowship is looking for fellows with a background in design, business, engineering, and medicine. Fellows will work in interdisciplinary teams to investigate and develop solutions for real clinical needs. For one year, they will experience a full innovation cycle from need to implementation.

Congratulations to our colleagues involved with Quantum Delta NL and QuTech. Last week the Dutch government awarded Quantum Delta NL €615m in a bid to power the advancement of quantum technologies.

For his graduation project, Design for Interaction MSc student Marten Westerhof developed a toolkit for Sustainable Rural Initiatives (SRI). With it, SRI employees are able to organise workshops in which children can playfully develop their design skills.

You might think that smart devices – something that can connect to the internet or another device – would be more sustainable. After all, if the lights and the thermostat only turn on when a person is present, they should use less energy. ‘But’ says Emilia Ingemarsdotter, ‘every technology has a hype phase’. For her PhD research, she wanted to look beyond the hype and critically examine the role internet-enabled devices play in the circular economy.