Yilin Quan is IDE’s 8000th graduate!

Today marks a milestone moment at the TU Delft | Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, as we celebrate our 8,000th graduate - Yilin Quan. Yilin graduated with his work on the CreatOrg Workshop, which helps boost the flow of creativity in organisations. IDE Dean Caspar Chorus surprised Yilin with the news right after his thesis defence. Congratulations Yilin!

Yilin Quan successfully defended his thesis and graduated from IDE’s Strategic Product Design (SPD) Master's programme on 21 August 2023. He did so under the guidance of Assistant Professor Milene Gonçalves and Postdoctoral Researcher and mentor Ufuk Gür.

About the CreatOrg Workshop

In today's workplaces, creativity is crucial. However, many individuals lack the confidence to express their creative ideas. Organisational culture has a significant influence on creative environments, making it important to address creative confidence by studying and implementing culturally sensitive interventions.

Yilin’s project focused on Rabobank and PostNL as case studies. Through qualitative research involving the organisations’ innovation coaches and coachees, he analysed the companies’ creative cultures and revealed key values.

Yilin designed the ‘CreatOrg Workshop’ to enhance creative confidence by promoting awareness of cultural values like 'care' and 'fun', and fostering idea generation and coaching skills. The workshop effectively boosted participants' creative confidence and sensitivity to these values, with potential for long-term impact. And while Yilin’s project may have been focused on Rabobank and PostNL, other organisations can certainly benefit from these insights to enhance their own creative cultures.

Facilitating creativity

Milene Gonçalves: “Yilin demonstrated great creative confidence during his master’s graduation project, which coincidently was also about creative confidence (in organisations)! As his chair, I’m very proud of the work he has done, especially because he was so diligent in connecting with companies as his case studies and organising public events, through the Connected Creativity Lab, to show his research insights and design work. In this way, he showed proactiveness, entrepreneurial attitude, and plenty of creativity. We all need a bit of creative confidence in our lives to venture into new challenges, and now that Yilin has graduated (IDE’s 8000th graduate no less!) I’m sure he will be able to inspire himself and others into creative action.”

I am very honoured by this recognition. To me design is more than creativity. It is about being sensitive to the world, about touching, seeing, feeling the world. I don’t know yet what I will do in my professional life, but I would love to keep on spreading the word on design, to help people look at the world from another perspective. I am considering to do a PhD with a focus on creativity or a job where I can further facilitate creativity.
Yilin Quan