About me

Full professor, chair of Design Techniques (2002) +++ Associate professor design techniques (1996) +++ PhD on Virtual Reality in Perception Research (1992) +++ Assistant professor Form Theory (1984) MSc Experimental Physics (RUN, 1984)

my interests

Ever since I came to this faculty, I have experienced Industrial Design (Engineering) as a great area for doing research if you have a diversity of interests. Mine focus on developing techniques and tools that support creative people in the early phases of idea and concept development. So I run into all kinds of incompatible disciplines and little-explored fields, where you need to integrate, e.g., aspects of perception and cognition, rich visualisation and media, expressive aesthetics, practical utility, ai (in small print, “a little Artificial Intelligence”, not a lot), contextual analysis, social and cultural studies, And, as designers are aware, you can never satisfy each of the specialities if you want to create a compelling whole. Thrilling stuff, great fun, especially if you can do it with good designers, researchers and students. I am in the lucky situation to have quite a lot of them around me at the ID-StudioLab.

a few of my roles

In the faculty’s official organisation, I am head of the section Design Communication and Conceptualization (DCC) in the department Industrial Design (ID); at the university, I am a member of the WerkCollege voor Promoties (adjunct to the Board for Doctorates), which deals with PhD defenses throughout the university. In education, I coordinate the MSc programme Design for Interaction (DfI), and coordinate the master course Context & Conceptualization (ID4216) . In research, I coordinate the theme Contexts around us(e) in the User Experience (UX) Program.

In the academic community, I am currently member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Design, the Birkhäuser series on Design (Bird); I am also program co-chair for the 4th World Conference on Design Research (iasdr2011), and co-editor of the special issue of CoDesign on Design & Emotion.

Last but not least, together with Liz Sanders of MakeTools, I am working on a book about generative design research, which we hope to get out by the end of this year 2011.
Informally, I am director of ID-StudioLab (but the photograph below was taken some time before that…).