Delft University of Technology

Delft University of Technology (TUD) is the oldest, largest, and most comprehensive technical university in the Netherlands. Industrial Design Engineering annually spends about 50 fte on the development and execution of the education. The input from the academic staff in research activities is also about 50 fte. With about 1800 students, the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering is one of the greatest of TUD. All teaching and research activities focus on design by a multidisciplinary approach integrating ergonomics, marketing, organisation and aesthetics with engineering, industrial production and sustainability. Most students graduate by designing products for industry. Of these 15 % do medical projects, all of which involve background field work.

Positioning in Faculty

ARIS*ER is positioned within the "Intelligence in Medical Technology" group. The main medical domains are ICU Nursing and Visualization and decision support in interventions.

Main research areas are:

• design- and design-research methodology development.
• human factors: especially sensory and cognitive ergonomics
• the design of future intelligent products, i.e. products with embedded software, which react context dependent, feeded by sensors or (processed) data; emphasis on the design of user-system interaction
• development of evaluation methods

Human factors

Since the faculty follows and anticipates trends in technology in recent years, they have noticed and intensely studied the phenomenon that many problems occur with users in interaction with modern devices: people have problems programming their consumer durables, professionals make mistakes caused by the complexity of the systems they work with (Bogner, 1994). This seems in contradiction with the potential of ICT to solve such problems. ICT should be applied in a user centred way to avoid such problems.

Research training

The training of researchers in ARIS*ER is supported by the available undergraduate program with many relevant courses. In particular the Masters Medisign program, training young designers in the medical field in close collaboration with various hospitals for the necessary field work- and the courses within the masters "Design for Interaction", with courses in the fields of new user centered design research techniques and actual training in the design of intelligence into devices.