Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering – TU Delft

The Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE), located at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, holds the largest university-based design course worldwide. Knowing that many "products" created and commercialized by organizations today are not just physical objects, the IDE Faculty aims at preparing future professionals who can embody innovative ideas into the best possible manifestation, whether the design outcome is a tangible product, a multimedia application, an environment, a brand, a service, or a combination of these. In this context, the growth of services in the global economies assumes special relevance, what is evidenced within the IDE Faculty by different initiatives concerning service design.

Design practice in service innovation

This research investigates service design by drawing on theoretical perspectives from the fields of service management, economics and engineering, in addition to industrial design and philosophy of technology. In special, insights from postphenomenological studies are used as a way to understand how individuals, most notably designers and users, experience the service interface during innovation processes. This project is led by the doctoral researcher Fernando Secomandi, under supervision of Prof. Dr Petra Badke-Schaub and Dr Dirk Snelders (TU Eindhoven/Aalto University).

Publications
- Secomandi and Snelders (forthcoming) The object of service design, Design Issues 27(3).
- Secomandi and Snelders (2010) Furthering interface design in services, Proceedings of the 8th Design Thinking Research Symposium (DTRS8).
See here.

Contact
Fernando Secomandi
www.fernandosecomandi.com

Contextmapping

The ID-StudioLab from the TU Delft is a multidisciplinary lab where practitioners, researchers, teachers and students work together on tools and techniques for the early stages of product and service development. Getting insight into the users' everyday experiences, involving them in co-creation sessions and exploring early experiential prototypes are main activities of ID-StudioLab.
Contextmapping is a method to map the context of product and or service use in people's everyday lives. It is a procedure that includes self-documentation of users, observations, and generative tools and making the outcomes useful for designing. The contextmapping research project is set up by Prof. P.J. Stappers and Assistant Prof. Froukje Sleeswijk Visser. Currently three PhD students are dedicating their research to contextmapping related topics. Helma van Rijn focuses on difficult to reach users (such as children with autism), Carolien Postma focuses on researching the social context and Christine de Lille focuses on making the outcomes of a contextmapping study applicable for SME's.

www.contextmapping.com
 
Publications
- Sleeswijk Visser, F (2009) Bringing the everyday life of people into design. Doctoral thesis TU Delft. Download here.
 
- Sleeswijk Visser, F., Stappers, P.J., van der Lugt, R., Sanders, E.B.N. Contextmapping: Experiences from practice. CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and Arts, 1(2), 2005, 119-149.
Download here.