Dr. ir. Bijl-Brouwer, M. van der

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering.

Academic Background

Mieke is a researcher, designer and educator with an interest in the practices that help us address complex societal problems. Within those practices she has a particular interest in design and problem framing, systemic & transdisciplinary design, human-centred design, and collaboration and learning. Mieke joined TU Delft in January 2019 on a Delft Technology Fellowship to further develop her research activities in designing for complex societal problems. 

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 (cum laude). She then moved to Australia to learn more about how design can be used to address complex societal problems 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 problems 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 problems, 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 Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation, where she developed, taught in and coordinated the second half of the curriculum of the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation from 2016-2018. At this time, she also founded Rad Social Design with her business partner Lucy Klippan to continue her innovation work with public sector organisations.  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.

Education

• 2012
  PhD (cum laude), University of Twente, the Netherlands
  Thesis: Exploring Usability - Design for Dynamic and Diverse Use Situations
• 2001
  MSc Industrial Design Engineering (cum laude), Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
  Thesis: Design of a User Interface for Television for Philips Consumer Electronics.

Experience

• 2019 ─ Present
  Associate Professor, Delft University of Technology
• 2017 ─ 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 – 2013
  Assistant Professor, University of Twente, Faculty of Engineering Technology, the Netherlands

Secondary employment

Adjunct Fellow - University of Technology Sydney