Design is a complex discipline.
It demands systematic approaches to guide and support designers and stakeholders at a time of great change. Delft researchers develop models, methods, tools and techniques to guide designers in creating products and services.
Over recent decades, there has been a shift from designing physical products to designing experiences. There has been a move from designing services to creating parts of larger systems. And a further shift from mass production to more personalised, agile manufacturing. These developments demand more flexibility and a different way of specifying the product, which might undergo further development post-delivery. Big data and AI bring further opportunities, together with new ethical concerns.
Designers need ways to deal with this rapidly evolving landscape. The Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) in Delft is unique in its focus on methods. We improve the understanding of design, increase design skills and propagate advanced design practices. Our audience is made up not only of academic peers, but also design practitioners and students at the Delft University of Technology and worldwide.
Doing design involves increasing complexity: more actors collaborate, more factors are integrated, more effects taken into account. At IDE we develop knowledge, methods, and tools to support those who do design: students, professionals, activists. We design how design can be done.
Pieter Jan Stappers
Professor of Design Techniques
How to do design
Here we gather a collection of current tools and methods developed by Delft designers which are free for you to use. Browse the selection, get inspired and start designing!
Design for Happiness Deck
by Pieter Desmet & Anna Pohlmeyer
The Design for Happiness Deck is a tool that taps into the vast potential of lasting wellbeing. Use it to break down the seemingly overwhelming phenomenon of happiness into manageable components that offer you a direct doorway to ideation and analyses of your design project.
Emotion Typology
by Steven Fokkinga
The negative emotion typology tool aims to provide a rich and varied database about the nuances of 36 negative emotions ranging from anger to anxiety. Use the filter on the main page to select and analyse emotions based on factors like duration, arousal, and action tendency and bring that understanding into your design process.
PrEmo (Emotion Measurement Instrument)
by Pieter Desmet & Peter Wassink
Our emotions define us humans but how fluent are we in expressing our own emotions? Our inability to express our own emotions poses a problem in design research. On the other hand, we are experts in reading the emotions of others, a mechanism which this tool has exploited in order to create a pictorial emotion scale.
Your Turn
developed by Mathieu Gielen & team at Wetenschapsknooppunt TU Delft
Involving specific user groups in the design process is established practice. But when it comes to co-designing with children, by training the children involved to develop design skills, designers can expect better project outcomes. The ‘Your Turn’ toolkit and lesson series trains children’s relevant 21st century skills (such as creativity, empathy and communication of design ideas) ‘on the job’ in appealing cases. ‘Your Turn’ consists of ready-to-go cases, instructions for building a design case from scratch, tools to apply and student materials. The set aims to bring reciprocal value: design outcomes for designers and learning outcomes for children – in the form of design skills.
