The Industrial Design faculty at Eindhoven University of Technology is young. Not many people are aware of the exact capabilities of the students or what it means to study Industrial Design. This profile is meant to communicate how Industrial Designers from the TU/e are educated and how they approach challenges. The main goal of this profile is to communicate the skills of Industrial Design students to companies outside of Lucid and the faculty of Industrial Design.
The goal of the study Industrial Design is to create interactive products, systems and services in a societal context. The study is an umbrella for different disciplines which means the students have a coherent overview of different areas of expertise. This overview makes it easy for an Industrial Design student to link the disciplines within a design process. A designer constantly has to adapt to changes in technology and society. At the faculty of Industrial Design, students learn to take control over their own knowledge, skills and development. When the students run into something unfamiliar to them or something they have never done before they can adapt their education and teach themselves new skills. Next to that, the students from our faculty are very open-minded and creative and always up for something different or new.
Industrial Design students are translators; they translate problems into solutions and wishes into product specifications. In this way, Industrial Design students form a bridge between technology and people. They reason from users to make technology intuitive for them. Industrial Design students have knowledge of many different disciplines and therefore are very versatile in their work. Every student has his own unique expertise but also has knowledge of the other competences.
As part of my role as Secretary and Commissioner of Public Relations in the board of Industrial Design’s study association Lucid in 2015-2016, I worked on communicating the capabilities of Industrial Design graduates. This profile was (and still is) used to explain our studies to external parties what kind of jobs Industrial Design graduates are suitable for, and was used to reach agreements with companies for internships and career-related activities for ID students.
Additional reading
The article was published in the 27th edition of Lucid’s magazine, the UNiD. Find a PDF of the article here.
