In my teaching I try to combine the newest things we learned from our research to useful things that design students should be able to use in their practice. The theory and practice of design are not moving any slower than those in other fields. I believe this coupling of research and teaching is necessary to keep research relevant to the field, and teaching up-to-date to the newest developments.

I’m involved in a number of courses and programmes:

Master Programme Design for Interaction

As coordinator of the Master programme Design for Interaction, I chair the workgroup that organizes and teaches this new(est) of IDE Master programmes. Design for Interaction is a new international Master programme (started september 2003) in which the user-product interaction is placed in the center of attention. In this master programme, the central problem of design is taken as this interaction: how people use, understand, and experience products. It is closely tied to Delft’s internationally recognized research strengths in the field of user-product interaction, user experience and emotion, design methodology, and integral development of interactive products.

Please note The video registration of the DfI-Thursday presentations, including a presentation by a students and graduates of major courses and projects, are online here

Courses

Personally, I am the course organizer for two courses: id4215Context and Conceptualization (required course for MSc DfI and MSc SPD, elective course for other students), and id3201the Rituals project (BSc IDE required course, 3rd year).

In id4215 Context and Conceptualization, a theoretical foundation is laid for analysing user contexts within a diversity of scientific frameworks, communicating these aspects in multidisciplinary teams, and conceptualizing new products and services. This course, which I teach together with dr. ir. Remko van der Lugt, prof. dr. Paul Hekkert, and ir. Froukje Sleeswijk Visser, provides a theoretical basis for designers’ insight in the contexts surrounding user-product interaction. Prominent elements in this course are Contextmapping, Visualisation and Communication, Vision in Product Design (VIP), and Scenario development.

id3201, the Rituals project, has a similar and double focus: studying contexts of product use, and communicating user experiences and their contextual structure in a design context. This 3rd year project provides an introduction to issues of communication, experience centered design, interaction design, and design communication in a pressure-cooker 3 week/3 poster presentations format.

Other courses

Under the responsibility of the chair of design techniques is a number of other courses, the organisation of which lies with experienced staff. These are
id3215 Information and Interaction. As the name suggests, this course combines elements of graphic design and information transfer (taught by prof. Paul Mijksenaar) with elements of interaction design and interactive prototype development (taught by Gert Pasman).
id4201? Design Manifestation taught by Wim Muller.
id-many the range of hand-drawing classes taught by Koos Eissen and the handtekenstaf.
ide521 Computer Visualisation taught by Daniel Saakes.

Yet More Courses

In some other courses, students can encounter me as a personal supervisor. Among these are
In id501 MSc Graduation projects I act as chair to several projects each year. Some of these are practical projects in industry, some of these are research projects in ID-StudioLab, some are joint collaboration projects between the ID-StudioLab and industry (this is my favourite, as it advances both research and practice at the same time). If you are a student looking for an MSc graduation project, my research interests and my teaching interests should give you a feeling for the kind of projects I supervise.

In id3215 Onderzoeksleer I try to contribute with several small research questions which are interesting for experiments by BSc IDE students. These typically involve either user studies or interaction design experiments. If you are a student who is typically interested in these topics and didn’t find an interesting project, contact me, and we may start one. My favourites onderzoeksleer-projects involve a combination of making (designing) and testing (analysing), and help my research interests to explore new directions in which there’s sufficient unexpected things to encounter (warning! You may find out new things.).