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”, for which I’m also responsible in the ID Curriculum Committee. In the past, I have taught the basics of prototyping and creative programming with Processing and Arduino at first year Bachelor level, data visualization in Bachelor and Master, and courses on designing with AI in the Master. Currently, I teach “Designing Connected Experiences” in the ID Bachelor and “Designing Conversational Experiences” and “Data-enabled Design” at Master level.
Designing Connected Experiences (Bachelor, since 2016)
Connected products are everywhere from industrial factories to the smart home, but most of the time they are just designed like traditional products with some (pointless) extra functionality that is sitting somewhere in the cloud. Designing connected products requires not only understanding and skills to use connectivity technologies, but also skills to pick and validate technologies for any type of project in such a way that we avoid last-minute surprises and costly re-designs. This elective teaches students how to use technologies for connected “things”, and students develop knowledge and skills in two small design projects around connected experiences.
Designing Conversational Experiences (Master, since 2024)
Conversational interactions have revolutionized how we interact with technology. Given that large language models as conversational user interfaces (CUI), e.g., ChatGPT, are now commonplace, creative designs of conversational interfaces are applicable almost everywhere. As designers, we consider long-term implications of increasingly agentic CUIs that are embedded in our everyday lives and how they can evolve over time. In this elective, students will explore state-of-the-art research on conversational user interfaces, design strategies, and development methodologies behind designing effective CUIs.
Data-enabled Design (Master, since 2018)
While data is starting to play an increasingly important role in the intelligent products, services and systems we design for, it is not yet so present in our design processes. Established data design methods, as data-driven design, emphasize the power of data to evaluate and validate design decisions. Data-enabled design provides a more designerly perspective, where data is used as creative material to inspire and inform new design interventions. It is characterized by a quick and iterative approach that sets out to remotely adapt prototypes while they are situated in the daily life of people. In this elective students learn how to use data as creative material for design, both on a conceptual level as a hands on implementation level. Central is the data-enabled design toolkit that helps students in running remote data-enabled design explorations. Finally, DED projects in industry are showcased. (See also our research on Data-enabled Design)
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. Currently, I’m coaching in the ARTIFICE squad dealing with diverse topies around Aesthetics and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.
In the past, I was involved 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]
Design for Social Interaction in Public Spaces
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.