Postdoc in Design Methodology on Designing Experiences with Data and AI

Over the last decade, designing with data and AI has become an important pillar in the repertoire of designers, who research or practice design in various domains from healthcare to industrial manufacturing. At the same time, this is a sweet spot for academic collaboration with industry as tools and methods overlap, and design research is increasingly recognized as a strategic advantage in industrial innovation processes. This provides a rich context for design research into methodologies and impacting the design landscape structurally. The Postdoc position offers resources and collaboration with over 20 academic and industrial design researchers to research, document and further develop methodological insights around Design Methods for Data and AI. In addition, we aim to connect experience design methodologies to innovation management, data science and AI-supported decision making. This involves Data-enabled Design, a method that has been successfully applied in Philips Experience Design for several years already, and working towards domain-specific extensions of the method, researching its application in other industrial segments, and connecting data design stakeholders in society.
A concrete goal for this Postdoc is to set up an effective design research agenda across several PhD trajectories, with the above-described stakeholders. Next to that, the Postdoc position will be connected to the Eindhoven MedTech Innovation Center (eMTIC) and the Eindhoven AI Systems Institute (EAISI). These networks provide further access to experts in medical technology and clinical practice, as well as AI, ML and HPC expertise. 

The position is offered in the Future Everyday group of the Industrial Design department of TU/e.

The Department of Industrial Design (ID) is one of the nine departments of TU/e and has an internationally leading position because of its core commitment to research through design (RtD) and its strikingly original conceptual work. ID's ambition is to be recognized as one of the top departments in the world that conduct exciting research in the intersection of Design, Technology, Human-Computer Interaction, and Social Sciences and Humanities. In particular, the department aims to inspire and educate a new generation of design engineers who can contribute with their novel designs, their fluency in AI/ML algorithms and data, and their academic critical questioning, to the imminent and complex societal challenges our world is facing nowadays.

'Future Everyday bridges the gap between emerging technologies and people's everyday life.'

The Future Everyday cluster is a highly ambitious community of design researchers, concerned with understanding, exploring, and shaping an everyday life of individuals/small groups that encompasses the new reality of living and working, in spaces that are becoming more responsive, continuous and experiential in the future with emerging technologies. Currently, we focus on designing with technologies such as internet of things, wearables/soft things, small/local data, machine learning --- and designing for aesthetics in an everyday life with all the nuances and subtleties that are inherently dynamic, ever-changing and shaped by personal and collective values, needs and desires. We seek to better understand how to create the right conditions --- over time and space --- to allow human-technology relationships to grow and adapt to future situations.