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ALUMNI

IO ALUMNI UPDATE JUNE 2011 In the past couple of months IO ALUMNI has been involved in some great design oriented community events… slowly gaining momentum as the central point for all Delft Design related activities. In 2010-2011 we have enjoyed more offline meetings than ever before!

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A dialogue House event @ ABN-AMRO with several relevant Alumni speakers • A successful Alumni day @ our faculty • A steady flow of design-mixers (Informative drinks @ design agencies of Alumni) • On the 10th of March there was a design-mixer @ Spark design & innovation at Rotterdam, talking about Crowd sourcing and Concepting • On the 27th of April there was a design-mixer @ Muzus in the Hague talking and experiencing the MUZUS User-centered design approach • On the 23rd of June there was a design-mixer @ SunIdee in Amsterdam giving the participants a good idea about consumer insights • A growing Alumni-student coaching programme.

A special coach event has been organized @ the faculty where a workshop on coaching was given by Rick Schiffenstein. Interested? Check out the coaching tab on the website.

• A book launch at the faculty where the first print was presented to the Alumni. ("From Floating Wheelchairs to Moving Car Parks; a collection of 35 experience-driven design projects") • Re-Links with BNO Romeo Delta events & KIVI NIRIA engineering platform endorsing and linking to their events • Interviews on ALUMNI TV. Jeroen van Erp and Laurens van der Acker… more to follow • New ALUMNI members joining and reinforcing our efforts … Sandra Wagemans • The LinkedIn group is growing fast with almost 1000 members from just 200 some two years ago. If you are not yet a member check out: http://linkd.in/jToPp7 •

All these activities attract an engaging group of alumni who are adding to their common story every time they meet!

We hope that 2011-2012 is going to be even more connected! IO ALUMNI is always on the lookout for people who want to add their unique perspective to our activities… so if you have a passion for getting interesting people together contact us on info@ ioalumni.nl When you read this some new activities are already being planned for September and beyond. Be sure to check our website (www.ioalumni.nl), our LinkedIn group and our Facebook group to be kept up to date!

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8/10/2011 2:07:22 PM

ALUMNI

AN INDUSTRIAL DESIGN ENGINEER FOUND AT A HEALTH INSURER

After I worked at Switzerland based Brainstore for a year, I was employed at Favela Fabric in Amsterdam. Among other things, they develop cocreation platforms to enable companies to discuss services and wishes with their clients. Doing this -and in every design process- it is of the greatest importance to ask the right questions and subsequently filter the underlying motivations from the answers you get.

These motivations matter: As an enterprise you should not do what the consumer asks for, but combine the motivations that drive that demand with your own strong vision on what you think the world should look like.

If you involve the party that executes the service and all other stakeholders as well, you are bound to end up in the right place.

Clarify and Communicate Whether or not you are a genius at the Adobe Creative Suite or a renowned sketching artist, being a designer you have to be able to picture complex systems, relations and solutions. By doing this you enable different people to grasp, discuss and analyze them. I am using this competence on a daily basis and it gives me distinctive value. I had quite some self esteem on this, but was frightened when I saw the progression students have made the last few years. As I joined the threeday Global Service Jam I witnessed students working faster, delivering more impressive and more useful representations. They produce a filmprototype of a complete service within three hours!

Several solutions In my second year of studying IDE when the faculty was still established at the Drebbelweg, I showed some secondary school pupils around.

Students like me who did so, received a list of answers on FAQs. Using the list, I could inform the pupils that 13% of graduated IDE students would end up working in financial services. I considered this as rather awkward: This wasn’t the purpose of us in this world, was it?

Ten years later I got hired at Achmea Health, spending most of my time working for health insurer Zilveren Kruis. I invented my own job description, and successfully convinced the Zilveren Kruis management that it would be a swell plan to create that job. I am positive that designers, their vision and methodology are indispensable in every organization that aspires to compete by offering better services as their competitors do. In the Netherlands this goes for almost every enterprise that does not want to compete –solely- on price level.

I would like to stress three specific competences IDEs add that give them unique value to service providing organizations.

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Holistic approach Clarify and communicate Several solutions

Holistic approach Designers always regard a product from a user’s perspective: something that is still overlooked by others quite often. When creating a Facebook page for instance, the objectives of the company for setting it up are fairly clear. Less attention is paid however to the question why customers would visit it.

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It is the nature of IDE-people to answer every problem with a series of solutions. Next they test and take several iteration steps to select and to figure out what needs improvement. In this process there is room for surprise and serendipity: finding what you were not looking for. When you step out of the Delft biotope, you learn this is not common practice. Most solution-searching is linear and focused on finding just one solution.

In conclusion it is not weird at all you find an IDE roaming through a health insurance its organization. However, trying to find ways to improve a service on a personal level for several millions of clients, cooperating with thousands of colleagues in a field in which maneuverability is limited by laws and regulations, is a whole other ball game than gathering five people around a table with steel table top and have a brainstorm with no boundaries. To fill that need I still have, I am starting my own company this summer, named Blickwinkel, where I will try and realize unorthodox projects with as few restrictions as possible.

To be continued!

Text by Reinout de Kraker // 37 turn the page

8/10/2011 2:07:23 PM

ALUMNI

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN ENGINEERS AS TRANSITION BOOSTERS

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eing a graduate student facing the challenge to combine the emerging fields of gaming and energy, it seemed that I should come in touch with something different than Industrial Design Engineering in particular. I was busy finding the core of motivation in people’s daily life and creating a clear overview of what gaming means besides shooting and racing.

First, it raised the question; “Is this Industrial Design Engineering?” But, since graduation worked out well and I got my diploma, I rephrased it to; “What is Industrial Design Engineering”?

Not worrying about this question anymore, I started thinking about work.

Graduation resulted in a pilot set up, which describes the way we thought that gaming could be introduced to encourage end-users for energy savings in daily life. By putting the pilot into practice it supposed to find some proof of concept and create solid ground for a decision to start commercialising the approach. Luckily, it turned out to be successful.

requires support from society in order to get things done. Consumers play a key role!

Industrial Design Engineering is the specialism that is able to combine an overall vision with practical society needs. It creates the products, services, software or whatever that fits to the (latent) wishes of people and make them intrinsically part of a transition. Since consumers play a key role in the ‘roll out’ of a transition, Industrial Design Engineers are actually a kind of practical focussed transition managers. Call it transition boosters.

Within our company we challenge ourselves to be the catalyst of the energy transition by focussing on the consumer. Coming up with new interactive solutions that change the way we experience energy in order to make the use of sustainable energy as logical as ...

Precisely this transition boost is Industrial Design Engineering!

After all, the pilot meant the first real introduction into the world of energy for me. The pilot was awarded for its ‘new approach’ and got attention from the complete sector. Although I hardly understood the interest for this apparently small ‘innovation’, it was clear that we, as industrial designers, could play a role in energy managment.

After being active in the world of energy for almost two years now, I think I’m getting a true grip on IDE’s added value.

The world of energy, as I call it, is big and complex. Not only because of the fact that so many stakeholders are involved on very different levels, but mainly since the sector is looking forward to some major, sustainabledriven changes. In short, the sector needs to prolong its trustworthy supply of energy and besides it has to create the possibility for the utilization of sustainable resources.

Stefan Versluis graduated in Strategic Product Design (Dec. 2008). He co-founded the company Shifft, which is active in the energy market through offering consumer focused solutions to create better involvement of the end-user within the energy system.

Besides, he is one of the active participants of the IO-Alumni and looking for the (new) IDE-dna.

Major changes though, that are often mentioned as the energy transition.

Many planned changes rely on technological innovation, however in terms of a transition, this does not get things moving. A real transition turn the page // 37

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