Biographies

Susie Brand-de Groot has now been a teacher in Design Visualization Techniques for as many as 18 years at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology. Over de years she developed herself to be an independent teacher and design coach, focusing on the visualization part of design processes.

Beside at TU Delft Susie has worked as a teacher for multiple educational institutions, ranging from retail and mechanical engineering students in The Netherlands to interior & design students in Belgium, and has held workshops in Belgium, Sweden and Italy.

As a young Interior Architect Susie specialized in theater design. Nowadays still, her ambition is to reinforce the vision of a director through design. She loves working closely with both director and actors to enhance the play together. In this, she doesn’t shy away from challenging the actors with her designs, making the story stronger along the way.

Hannes (°1990) graduated as a Master in Commercial Engineering at the UAntwerpen. After working in IT consulting he taught courses in the field of general economics for two years at the same university. He currently works as a project manager for De Kringwinkel Antwerpen. The project aims to contribute to the development of initiatives in the circular economy. One of the key performance indicators here involves the establishment of different economically profitable solutions for maximum reuse of discarded goods and the recovery of non-reusable parts. In order to make consumers question our current destructive buying patterns a pragmatic approach, which focuses on positive alternatives, emotional experiences and improved services, is used.

Wouter Eggink is a design professional and assistant professor of Industrial Design Engineering at the University of Twente. He is affiliated with the Department of Design, Production and Management, where his research centers around the relationships between design, technology and society. His approach is based on the collaboration between design research and philosophy of technology, for which he coined the term “the practical turn”.

Wouter Eggink is coordinator of the Industrial Design Engineering master track “Human Technology Relations” and Research Fellow of the DesignLab of the University. He teaches Design Histories and also the course Create the Future, based on scenario development.

Ricarda holds degrees in Interior Design (M.A.) and Architecture (B.A.) from OWL University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Detmold. She has worked both as a freelance designer and a research associate with profound experience in the teaching areas interior design, entrepreneurship and human sciences. She invented and ran the "Detmold Campus Agency", a networking agency that brings together companies and students to work on real life projects. Currently, she is a design strategist at the LivingLab Essigfabrik, Cologne.

Ricarda and Henrik Mucha have organised and run many design workshops with clients, researchers, colleagues, and students. They both are certified coaches for SEA Social Entrepreneurship workshops and experienced with large workshop formats such as the Detmold Master workshop week.

Aydin Mert has been leading projects at Philips Experience Design team for Research and Innovation programme, mostly for patient monitoring & analytics and image guided therapy domains since 2015. He has worked and lived in Turkey, USA, Sweden and the Netherlands in wide range of topics. Between 2010 and 2013, he was part of the design team at Veryday, Sweden, which has 50+ years leadership in people-driven innovation, where he got involved in projects such as medical equipment, consumer healthcare, professional hand tools and personal protection equipment. Later he took lead design role at Atlas Copco Industrial Design team in 2013 where he worked with design strategy, branding and usability topics.

With 15+ years of international experience and masters degree of Advanced Product Design from Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden, Aydin has always been a curious designer, interested in the interrelationships between the needs of people, technology and their emotional projection in our creative minds.

Henrik has studied Industrial Design at Duisburg-Essen University and Usability Engineering at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences. Currently, he is a research associate at Fraunhofer IOSB in Karlsruhe, Germany. In his day job Henrik works on using Participatory Design as a tool to make Artificial Intelligence more explainable. Henrik has long been interested in running and investigating design workshops as a tool in business, research, and teaching.

Henrik and Ricarda Jacobi have organised and run many design workshops with clients, researchers, colleagues, and students. They both are certified coaches for SEA Social Entrepreneurship workshops and experienced with large workshop formats such as the Detmold Master workshop week.

Alec Robertson is a provocateur on design-futures. He enjoys joining-the-dots within trans-disciplinary projects. Alec has a particular focus on what he calls 4D Design: adding value with cultural and technological dynamics to products, systems and services for commercial and social enterprises.

Alec is an experienced academic and currently an MA Examiner and also an Assessor for UK Government innovation competitions. He has in an interest in design methods for assisting future innovation and imagining the evolution of designs. Graduate of RCA Design Research and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

David Sherriff sees commercial products far more widely than being material objects. He believes that products will increasingly acknowledge their art-performance aspect and be crucial to making things happen. Classic product designs transform into art. Future classics will transcend into performance art.

David is an entrepreneur, consultant and freelance designer, He has extensive industry experience with design work involving cars, motorbikes, trains, aircraft-interiors, boats, electronic-music-instruments, glass & ceramics, maps, animations, e-transports, buildings, heritage-homes  within the UK, USA, Sweden and Germany. Graduate of RCA Automotive Design and an apprentice to Architect Mario Bellini, Milan.

Fred helps brands and companies communicate their values and deliver on their promise by creating marketing, brand, product, packaging and service concepts. He regularly joins forces with experts in product design, audio-visual production and engineering. Fred has worked on accounts such as: British Airways, Marriott, McDonald’s, Virgin Australia and Qatar Airways.

Fred worked seven years in the design industry in Singapore and returned to Europe in 2013 to join gategroup, where he currently fills the position of Design Director at deSter. He is seasoned in every aspect of communication and has a weakness for typography.

Anne Britt Torkildsby has a background in industrial design from Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden, holds a PhD in design from The Swedish School of Textiles, and is currently doing research at The Norwegian Laboratory of Universal Design; The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Her research interests are in the areas of Critical Design thinking applied in Universal Design settings (theory and design methodology), Universal Design for Higher Learning (teaching methods and learning materials), and last but not least, how the Built Environment affect our health and well-being.

https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/anne.torkildsby

Odette Lunettes productmanager, Emiel Tormans graduated last year as Product Designer from the University of Antwerp. After an internship at Odette Lunettes in 2018, he became their productmanager, responsible for the production and designlines of the brand.

Odette Lunettes started five years ago as a new Belgian eyewearbrand. Eline de Munck, one of the founders of the brand, focused on trendy, young and affordable eyewear that fits everyone.

Vadim (°1989) holds a Master’s degree in Commercial Engineering from the UAntwerpen. He currently works as a self-employed entrepreneur in Business Intelligence, focusing on data-driven decision making and finance. He describes himself as an open-minded person who values teamwork and communication as well as intrinsic motivation. In his spare time Vadim examines the possibilities on how we - as humans - can evolve towards a more plant based diet. Plastic waste streams have always been on Vadim’s radar since pollution, like food choice, threatens our global environment.

I'm Margaux Verbist, brand and product developer at Trixie. Ever since I graduated as master in the Product Development, Trixie has been my playground. Over the years, I got to work on the brand and its products from every possible angle: graphic identity, marketing campaigns, social media, design of booths/in store displays, styling of photoshoots, textile design, print development, production, etc. Working on all domains around the brand and product is a privilege. It allows you to create story that sticks and there is no such thing as a boring day at work!

In 1996 I graduated at the faculty “Product development” in Antwerp.

I worked in different company’s as a mechanical designer:
www.theo.be, www.dupont.com, alcatel-lucent, verhaert.com, niko.eu

Since 2009, I have worked as an independent consultant in product development for various company’s.

My main focus as a professional designer is mechanical conceptional design and materialisation of ideas in high volume markets.

In my spare time I like to make stuff and spend time on the Tatami or in the snow.