Personal description

I obtained my Master degree in Integrated Product Design at the Delft University of Technology in Septermber 2007. The topic of my graduation project was ‘community based design support’. With the aim to bridge the gap between design methodology and designers in practice I developed and built a community platform to support designers with design methods and tools, which was tested in a company environment. The project proved to be a good starting point for a PhD project. Since March 2008 I am doing a PhD project with the title: “Community Based Design Support”.

Selected publications

Daalhuizen, J., Badke-Schaub, P., Fokker, J. (2008). Community Based Design Support. In I. Horváth & Z. Rusak, Proceedings of TMCE 2008 conference, Izmir, Turkey.

Horváth, I., Tromp, N., and Daalhuizen, J., 2003, “Comprehending a Hand Motion Language in Shape Conceptualization,” Proceedings of ASME 2003 Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference-DETC’03, Chicago, IL, CD-ROM: DETC2003/CIE-48286.

Project: Community Based Design Support

with Petra Badke-Schaub, Pieter Jan Stappers, Joris Vergeest

Project description

“How do the personal and social dimension influence design activity” and “how can designers be supported in a way that fits these dimensions”.

The practice of designing is becoming more complex and has to adapt to a globalizing, networked society. Furthermore, design methodology has distanced itself from the designer, resulting in abstract and generalized models that offer little hands-on support to the designer. We assume that the reason for this is the discrepancy between the rational way design methods are usually offered to designers, and the opportunistic way designers like using them. There is a substantial lack in design methods to address personal, social and dynamic dimensions of designing.

The aim of the PhD project is twofold:

1. To do research on the personal, social dimensions of design in practice and how they (should) relate to design methodology.

2. To develop simultaneously an operational, interactive community platform which will enable research in design context; a ‘research through design’ approach.