Education

I have been teaching in the Industrial Design Bachelor and Master programs of TU/e for over 10 years now. On this page and below you will find information on current and past courses, workshops and individual student projects. If you are a student at TU/e Industrial Design and you are interested in your own project, contact me directly for Final Bachelor projects, Master Research projects, or Final Master projects.

Courses

In the department of Industrial Design, I teach several courses related to the Expertise Areas “Technology and Realization” and “Math, Data and Computing”. The topics range from the basics in Processing and Arduino at first year Bachelor level to “Designing with Advanced AI” and “Data-enabled Design” at Master level.

Currently, I’m responsible for the courses “Technologies for Connectivity” in the ID Bachelor and “Data-enabled Design” in the ID Master. I’m also teaching in the TU/e-wide basic course “Data Analytics for Engineers”, a project-based IoT course in the Bachelor, and the ID Master courses “Designing with Advanced Artificial Intelligence” and “Creativity and Aesthetics of AI”.

In the past, I have taught courses about creative programming, data visualisation in the Bachelor and Systems Design in the Master program.

Projects

Industrial Design is big on project-based education. As such, students in our education program here at TU/e ID, work on semester-long projects almost every single semester of their studies. These projects take place in squads, that is, educational units of 30 - 40 students. I teach in the squad, Designing Growing Systems in the Home (in short, DIGSIM) together with my colleagues. Students in our squad work on projects around the IoT Sandbox (Frens et al., 2018). They design with and against complexity that is inherent in a grown smart home context.

Graduation projects

You can find an updated list of student theses (Bachelor and Master) in the repository of Eindhoven University of Technology.

Design workshops

From time to time, I give design workshops on topics close to my research interests in design tools and methods.

Group Music Improvisation workshops

This workshop invites scholars, practitioners and students of design and design research, especially those with a keen interest in designing for performances, musical expression and blurring the line between designing and using. During this workshop you explore how to design in the context of distributed, networked interfaces, dynamic input-output mappings and emergent aesthetics. You do this in the context of group music performance. [more]

A series of international workshops in China from 2013 – 2015. [more]

References

interactive architecture, interface design, int...

Frens, J., Funk, M., van Hout, B., & Le Blanc, J. (2018). Designing the IoT sandbox. Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 341–354.
Abstract BibTeX Link to publication
```
@inproceedings{2d116347018d4ac9b5b099caa3daa1f6,
  title = {Designing the IoT sandbox},
  keywords = {interactive architecture, interface design, internet of things, physical interaction},
  author = {Frens, Joep and Funk, Mathias and {van Hout}, Bastiaan and {Le Blanc}, Joep},
  year = {2018},
  month = jun,
  day = {11},
  doi = {10.1145/3196709.3196815},
  language = {English},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-5198-0},
  pages = {341--354},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference},
  publisher = {ACM Press}
}
```
This pictorial describes the design and design process of the IoT Sandbox: a (scale model of a) smart home equipped with actuators and a modular interface that controls the interactive aspects of the smart home. This modular interface can ’grow" together with the house it controls whereby it offers unique possibilities for designers to explore different avenues of physically rich interaction in domestic personal spaces. We demonstrate that also physically rich interfaces can respond adequately to the dynamics of home IoT systems. We conclude with insight from the design process and a concise discussion and outlook to future work.