Dr. ir. Ozkaramanli, D.

Deger Ozkaramanli is assistant professor of Designing with Dilemmas at Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. Her work explores the ethics of design, which she investigates with a focus on moral dilemmas that arise in design processes, particularly when designing for health and wellbeing with vulnerable groups.

Deger is fascinated by the richness of dilemmas people experience in daily life. That’s why as a designer and researcher, she has developed dilemma-driven design, which she still pursues in her work. Besides being interested in the psychology of dilemmas, she utilizes the interdisciplinary potential of the dilemma phenomenon as an analytical tool to examine design practices. Her aim is to advance knowledge at the intersection of ethics and design methods through focusing on moral design dilemmas. For this, she weaves together knowledge from moral psychology, ethics of technology and critical theory. Ultimately, she aims to support critical-ethical reflection in design practices, which she believes is most needed when working with vulnerable groups.

Deger’s work spans the full spectrum of design knowledge from theory to practice (and back) as she firmly believes that these two aspects inform and inspire each other. She often works with qualitative and participatory research methods and adopts a phenomenological and critical stance in studying design practices.

Academic Background

Deger has an interdisciplinary and international academic background with a BSc. and an MSc. degree in industrial engineering (Louisiana State University (2005) and University of Miami (2008), respectively) and a second-MSc. and a PhD degree in Industrial Design (Delft University of Technology (2010, 2017)). Before rejoining TU Delft in January 2023, she worked as an assistant professor at the University of Liverpool (2016-2018) and at the University of Twente (2018-2022).

Specialisation / field of research

• Dilemma-driven design
• Design ethics
• Design methods
• Design for wellbeing with vulnerable groups

Lectures/Coaches students on:

• Designing for Society (Design Project 4)