Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e): Where innovation starts, and people matter! TU/e is a young university, founded in 1956 by industry, local government and academia. Today, this spirit of collaboration is still at the heart of the university community. We foster an open culture where everyone feels free to exchange ideas and take initiatives.
TU/e offers academic education that is driven by fundamental and applied research. Our educational philosophy is based on personal attention and room for individual ambitions and talents. Our research meets the highest international standards of quality. We push the limits of science, which puts us at the forefront of rapidly emerging areas of research.
Eindhoven University of Technology combines scientific curiosity with a hands-on mentality. Fundamental knowledge enables us to design solutions for the highly complex problems of today and tomorrow. We understand things by making them and we make things by understanding them.
Our campus is in the center of one of the most powerful technology hubs in the world:
Brainport Eindhoven. Globally, we stand out when it comes to collaborating with advanced industries.
Together with other institutions, we form a thriving ecosystem with one common aim - to improve quality of life through sustainable innovations. The TU/e puts emphasis on knowledge valorization: research results are translated into successful innovations and serve as a basis for creating new products, processes, and enterprises.
The
Department of Industrial Design (ID) is one of the nine departments of TU/e and has an internationally leading position because of its core commitment to
research through design (RtD) and its strikingly original
conceptual work. ID's ambition is to be recognized as one of the top departments in the world that conduct exciting research in the intersection of Design, Technology, Human-Computer Interaction, and Social Sciences and Humanities. In particular, the department aims to inspire and educate a new generation of design engineers who can contribute with their novel designs, their fluency in AI/ML algorithms and data, and their academic critical questioning, to the imminent and complex societal challenges our world is facing nowadays.
The
ID education program is competence-centered, self-directed and challenged-based. ID focuses on educating students to design through five different perspectives (called Expertise Areas), through core courses and electives:
- math, data and computing
- user and society
- technology and realization
- business and entrepreneurship
- creativity and aesthetics
Students also learn to make connections between the different perspectives within project groups called squads. In addition, the ID education curriculum encourages and empowers students to take the ownership of their personal and professional development. Supported by their academic coaches, through ID curriculum and their personal, industrial and research projects, students develop a unique competence of designing and related design approaches individually. Next to self-directed learning and competence development, the educational model of ID is challenge-based. ID students work together on challenging and authentic projects in which multiple perspectives or disciplines are incorporated to solve the challenge (for example by working within interdisciplinary groups) using an entrepreneurial mindset.
At the Industrial Design department we have two research groups: Systemic Change and Future Everyday. For information about Systemic Change and their vacancy read further below. For more information about the Future Everyday group and their current opening click
here.
The
Systemic Change group aims to define and explore new design approaches, methods, and theories that can drive creative, often technological, propositions for how to address contemporary complex societal challenges. The technological interventions that we create and research are tailored to the societal context with explicit attention for the people involved. The complexity of the societal systems that we design for implies that we make use of and contribute to inter-, cross- and transdisciplinary approaches. Our research mission involves a broad spectrum of interventions, from prototypes of products and services that can help to address concrete societal challenges, such as stimulating physical activity in diverse segments of the population, through developing new collaborative design methods and tools that support the design of socio-technical systems, to making theoretical contributions to the field of design, as, for example, in Transforming Practices.
Current qualities of
the Systemic Change group:
- Reputation in research through design, user experiences, real-life data acquisition and representation, design-philosophy correspondence, and interdisciplinary approaches
- Track-record in design conferences (CHI, DIS, TEI, DRS, …) and top-ranked journals
- Ambitious research facilities for making, realizing, and evaluating prototypes in the everyday context through living labs
- Innovative and fruitful collaboration between research, education, private and public organizations, government, and civil society