My official role at the faculty is Teacher of Design and Inspiration. This means that I try to provide students, other teachers the insights and tools they might need for inspiration in their design process. I do this by coordinating, organising, participating, coaching and advising in many different courses. As a coach, lecturer or advisor I’ve been involved in numerous courses, such as: Interaction & Electronics, Video for Designers, Interactive Environments, Bachelor Final Project, Design Driven Innovation, Interactive Technology Design, Cross Media Interaction Design.

DfI Master Identity Day

Shortly after the faculty started to offer three Master programmes, I was involved in the Master Identity Days for the Design for Interaction Master. These days are offered at the beginning of each semester in September and February. A full day in which students from each cohort, researchers and teachers from several courses are invited to explore what the master stands for and how we as a community shape this.

Initially – from 2009 until 2013 – with Pieter-Jan Stappers as the DfI Master coordinator, the Master Identity Days were done in-house, focusing on tools and techniques and emphasising community building. With Pieter Desmet as the master coordinator, the focus started to be more targeted at the value that our master students could offer to society by collaborating with external organisations on societal issues.

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Playlist of solutions for the Municipality of Rotterdam to Take on Trash in 2015

To give you some inspirational highlights of those days, check out Pieter’s page on the Master Identity Days. Each day resulted in great short videos of new ideas for different societal issues. For example in 2015 we helped the municipality of Rotterdam to Take on Trash in different cases, resulting in solution movies in this YouTube playlist (my favourite videos are the Duck Police and Truber).

IDE Academy

The biggest course that encapsulates inspiration in design education is IDE Academy. This course was a direct result from the amazing energy and results in the Master Identity Days. The combination of students autonomously learning through doing, the public causes benefiting from the results and the positive effects on the community as a whole made us thing: what if we could offer this kind of education every week?

In IDE Academy, we offer all first year Master students the chance to acquire new skills or work on existing skills in a safe learning environment interactive workshops. Each Wednesday we offer around 2 to 4 full-day workshops on things like research, prototyping, presentation, technology, business etc. Students can select a workshop to do during that day and after they finished 14 workshops we ask students to reflect on these skills to get their 4 EC. In total this results in offering around 100 workshop each year on a variety of topics.

In February 2020 we had to transition this course to online, which was quite a challenge. Since July 2021 I have handed over coordinatorship of this course to Charlotte Kobus, Erik Tempelman and Arno van Leeuwen.

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Me, introducing IDE Academy to students and teachers in 2017

Understanding Design

For the new bachelor I am setting up a new course with Bregje van Eekelen, exploring the definition and phenomenon of Design as we practice, research and teach it here in our faculty. We try to make the students and teachers look at Design from different perspectives, especially looking at the socio-historical implications of design. This course was given the first time with a wonderful team in September 2021 with great feedback. Accompanying the course there is a podcast series Understanding Design (in Dutch) that is part of the search for what Design actually means.

Podcast Understanding Design

MsC Graduations