News

It’s been a long and well-deserved summer break. Before we headed off, we had a lovely chat with two international student editors of IDE. Yuka & Jack already share their experiences as international students as student editors on the IDE website. For this bonus episode, they talk with Ianus and Producer Marc about work-life balance, what’s it like studying Delft Design and much more. Enjoy! We will be back with our final episode on design & health soon.

A team of researchers from TU Delft, Imperial College London, and Aalto University have received a EIC Pathfinder Challenge grant of 4 million euros for their NextSkins research project on Engineered Living Materials.

On 25 June, the Child Brain Lab celebrated its official opening with a symposium at Erasmus MC. During the event, Assistant Professor Mathieu Gielen presented student work from his Play Well Lab. Their work, alongside his own and that of other design researchers, will play an important role in the type of experience that children with neurological pathologies have when they visit the Sophia’s Children Hospital in Rotterdam.

Addressing the complex challenges of today and tomorrow requires many actors, perspectives and disciplines. But forming effective and mutually beneficial collaborations can be challenging. Designing with Delft aims to facilitate this process, bringing researchers and educators from the university together with innovators from organisations to identify common goals, define a shared vision and develop concrete plans for collaborations.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could achieve structural optimality and visual appeal at the same time? Well, the recent work of IDE researchers Jun Wu, Paul Hekkert, and DfI master’s students Shannon Loos, Sytze van der Wolk, and Nina de Graaf demonstrates that it is possible. To find out how, be sure to click the link below and read their paper, “Towards intentional aesthetics within topology optimization by applying the principle of unity-in-variety”, which was published last week in the journal of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization.

The Design for Sustainability team at IDE has acquired three collaborative NWO circular design projects. While each project is unique, they collectively contribute to a knowledge pool that addresses how products can be designed from the start to keep them from entering the waste stream for as long as possible. The projects range from investigating how wind turbine blades can be designed better to improve their re-use and material longevity (LICHEN-Blades), to developing electronics that can be recycled better (Circular Circuits), to addressing harmful substances in products so they can be used over multiple life-cycles (Safe-by-Design Circular Products).

On Thursday 9 June, the TU Delft campus will be buzzing like never before. On that day, students will be presenting their ideas on how to accelerate the energy transition. Over the past six months, more than 15,000 TU Delft students have followed a course on energy transition. This has resulted in a large number of ideas and prototypes that can be seen on 9 June during the Energy Challenge Event, which is part of TU Delft's anniversary year.

Do you have a cool project you have been working on and that want to share with the world? Then here is your chance to show it off. On the 20th of June, students from all of the Dutch Industrial Design and Engineering faculties will gather in Eindhoven to present their coolest projects. You can even win some awesome prizes! Sign up here before the 7th of June.

Need a spare part to repair your product with? The TU Delft Repair Group (Julieta Bolaños Arriola, Alma van Oudheusden, Bas Flipsen, and Jeremy Faludi) has got you covered. They released their 3D Printing for Repair Guide and it's chalked full of useful examples and videos. If you, or anyone else in your network, is interested in developing spare parts with 3D printing – make sure to check out this guide. You can find the guide here.

4TU.Design United is once again taking part in Dutch Design Week (22-30 October 2022) in the form of the Design Research & Innovation (DRIVE) Festival, Up Close & Personal, and a corresponding expo in the Klokgebouw. If you would like to participate and/or contribute, please submit your proposals before the 15th of June.

On 11 May, ID Education hosted the 2022 Pluim Awards at the ID Kafee. The annual event was a success with beautiful weather, fantastic company, and plenty of awards given out. Speaking of awards, this year was unique. Instead of having three nominees and one winner per category, ID Education chose to spotlight all the nominees as winners.

The obvious triggers of stress are all around us: pressing deadlines at work, children not sleeping through the night, a leaking roof. But sometimes it's smaller things, certain locations or specific times of day, that increase our stress levels. Understanding those triggers using wearable technology, with a focus on people who experience a lot of stress - people with PTSD - was the topic of Xueliang Li’s PhD research.

Vanaf 30 mei wordt het duurzame, interfacultair onderwijsgebouw Echo in gebruik genomen door docenten en studenten. Vanaf het nieuwe collegejaar zullen alle zalen ingeroosterd worden en is de horeca volledig in bedrijf.

Mobility is usually thought of as cars, bridges and container ships. But a group of TU Delft designers aim to lay bare the complex role of mobility in shaping our society. On June 21st a unique public event will put the underlying role of mobility centre stage. Project co-founder and creative director, Professor Matthijs van Dijk: “From the movement of assets and materials to the flow of people and ideas, by examining a broader perspective of mobility, our aim is to better understand how to design for society.”

Caspar Chorus appointed Dean of Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE).

Op 9 juni staat het Bouwcampus-terrein van de TU Delft in het teken van de energietransitie. Tijdens dit grote event voor de hele TU Delft community laten studenten hun ideeën voor de toekomst van de energietransitie zien. Bijna alle studenten besteden dit jaar in het onderwijs aandacht aan de overgang naar een maatschappij waar de energievoorziening duurzamer is. Een groot aantal ideeën en prototypes is op deze dag te zien tijdens het Energy Challenge Event dat plaatsvindt in het kader van het lustrum van de TU Delft.

IDE has launched four new MOOC programmes centred around circularity on edX. The programmes include Sustainable Engineering Design,Sustainable Packaging, Sustainable Packaging, and Sustainable Design of Electronics. The team hopes that with the launch of these new programmes, people will gain a greater and more specialised knowledge on a range of topics related to sustainability and circularity.

IDE Assistant Professor Nazli Cila has received an honourable mention for her single-authored paper, ‘Designing Human-Agent Collaborations: Commitment, responsiveness, and support’, from the 2022 CHI papers committee. For this year conference, the CHI papers committee received 2,579 complete submissions. Of those 2,579, the committee accepted 638 papers following the revision and resubmission process. Of those accepted, a mere 5% of submissions received an honourable mention.

Imagine wanting to construct a personalised bike saddle, but the materials at your disposal are either too stiff for some parts of the buttocks or too soft for others… Creating a product that has different parts, each with unique requirements, often requires the use of different materials. But innovations in 3D printing are changing this by making it possible to create objects with spatial gradations in surface and volumetric properties – in other words, functionally graded materials (FGMs). These engineered metamaterials go beyond the characteristics found in naturally occurring materials. For his PhD, Tim Kuipers explored how toolpath generation and a manufacturing technique called fused filament fabrication (FFF) can be used to create more complex objects with varying material properties.

Algorithms are all around you. They are in your office building within computer-regulated thermostats, they help pilots land the planes you fly in, they help robots manufacture the goods you use every day. But how do designers know which process to use or what information their devices need? And how do they get the many algorithms, which control these devices, to work together? In his Ph.D. research, Sirasak Tepjit set out to create a framework to help designers with exactly that.

To kick off this year’s Open Education Week, We Like Sharing organised a photo competition around the theme ‘IMAGining Energy transition’. The competition was open to staff, students, and alumni. All of the images submitted were then added to the We Like Sharing image bank, meaning they can be used by staff and students under a Creative Commons License. To find out the story behind IDE’s José Hekkens’ winning photo (as seen above), the We Like Sharing platform, and how you could win a mystery prize click here.

What if planning a trip feels just like when buying a tailor-made suit in a specialist store? Where you feel welcome, valued and unique. Where an expert listens to your wishes and then provides tailor-made advice that matches your personal style and preferences, but can also give you surprising suggestions that you would not have thought of so easily by yourself.

The TU Delft | Delft Global Student Club (DGSC) celebrated its official kicked off on 8 March. The event featured Prof. dr. Rob F. Mudde as the opening speaker, followed by presentations from TU Delft researchers and students – including IDE researcher Karl Heinz Tondo Samenjo, IDE alumnus Jerry de Vos, and 3MEE/IDE researcher Prosper Oyibo.

On 8 March, Professor Conny Bakker took part in the Work Programme Monitoring and Steering Circular Economy webinar organised by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL). She presented on the findings of her report, ‘Product Design in a Circular Economy’.

Ten of the fifty Het Financieele Dagblad Talents 2022 have ties to Delft and of those ten, three studied at IDE. With their innovative and distinctive ideas, they are helping the world move forward and making us take a closer look at our waste streams. A big congratulations goes out to Jerry de Vos, Susanna Osinga, and Simon van der Jagt.