Graduation opportunities

Healthcare services constantly need to change to improve health outcomes, reduce costs, and improve the experiences of workers and patients. Developing new practices for doing this supports this transition. Here, design research in the health domain impacts in many ways, such as affecting policy, service delivery practices, research methods, and design practices. In this graduation opportunity, we will focus on how design research can create a stronger connection to design practice in the health domain. CardioLab is one of the Delft Design Labs that focus on the healthcare domain, and we are interested in how we and the other design researchers in healthcare at TU Delft can come closer to practice.

This project aims to explore and inspire how interventions can support the well-being of families in disadvantaged communities. Design and knowledge generated in the project can be directly impactful towards design of an intervention for the project ‘Our Smart Family Buddy’, a collaboration with Erasmus Medical Centre amongst other institutions. The goal is to co-design an intervention—whether a product, service, or toolkit—that aids in transforming value tensions towards health-supportive choices of parents around nutrition.

The organization Dienstencentrum is part of the Administrative Department of the Ministry of Justice and Security and is responsible for the business operations for this part of the Ministry. We work with various government suppliers such as FMH and SSC-ICT. In addition, the Dienstencentrum manages the accommodation in the Turfmarkt office building, the North Tower.

Het Franciscus ziekenhuis staat voor de uitdaging om hoogwaardige en toekomstbestendige geboortezorg te leveren, waarbij de focus ligt op innovatie, patiëntgerichtheid en efficiëntie. Om in te spelen op veranderingen in de zorgvraag en verwachtingen van patiënten, willen we de bestaande visie verder ontwikkelen waarbij ingespeeld wordt op de actuele en toekomstige behoeften binnen de geboortezorg. Denk hierbij aan innovatiegebieden zoals patiëntcommunicatie, pijnbestrijding, efficiëntere zorgprocessen en verbeterde samenwerking binnen het team.

While prototyping and mapping techniques are widely used in the design domain, they are rarely used by healthcare professionals. This is potentially due to the lack of materializing skills that people in the healthcare sector possess. Designers have extensive training in creating future scenarios, but that is not the case for many other disciplines. The potential in prototypes lies in that they make things concrete. By creating a concrete visualization of a service, you are able to identify potential issues, use it to align between di erent disciplines, and identify potential issues by making adaptions in the service and/or context.

While innovation is necessary to be able to create more value in the future, the scope to innovate is limited. Based on this notion, the student within this graduation project is expected to develop an innovation process that is fit for NGOs, to help them to make changes to produce more value for their cause. The thesis project is conducted in collaboration with Medair, a Swiss humanitarian organization. Medair responds to human su ering across the globe, caused by displacement, disasters, and disease. Delivering emergency medical care, food, WASH (water, sanitation, hygiene) infrastructure, and shelter to vulnerable people are Medair’s core activities.

In today’s linear economy, the rapid replacement of consumer electronics leads to CO2 emissions, resource scarcity, e-waste and pollution, thereby providing important environmental and societal challenges. Most consumer electronics are currently replaced because of the inability to fulfil their main function or a loss in performance. A repair economy in which consumers adopt repair practices can resolve such performance issues, leading to a Circular Economy for consumer electronics.

Step into the world where cutting-edge technology meets healthcare innovation. At LAIXR, a research group within the cardiothoracic surgery department in the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), we develop Virtual Reality (VR) simulators powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to transform medical training and improve patient care. Our VR tools help medical professionals master complex skills and provide patients with better experiences by reducing stress, explaining their treatment journeys, or managing pain through distraction. While we excel in technology development, there’s still work to be done in refining user friendly designs to maximize their impact.

This graduation project builds on an AI-mediated pipeline for designing physical interactions with various hardware and software, originally developed during the Prompting Realities project at AI Futures Lab. The project aims to explore how conversational AI can transform the way designers prototype interactive technology. Instead of writing code, we can describe what the object is in plain language, explain what we want it to do, and let the AI take care of making it happen.

In online fashion retailing, communicating clothing fabric is difficult, leading to unnecessary returns. Different ways of presenting fabric properties will be compared (e.g., using pictures, videos, or interactive graphics) in order to help people in getting an accurate perception of the fabric online.