20 October 2010

Daan van Eijk ~ TUDelft Design Engineering, Plus!

Delightful to have visiting professor of ergometrics and design Daan van Eijk from TUDelft -- the "Dutch MIT" -- join me on MaximizingProgress.tv tonight! Daan's newly responsible for being Director of Education for their 2,100 student school of Industrial Design Engineering. So he decided to go on a study-tour of peer universities -- Stanford, CMU, Northwestern, MIT, Harvard, etc -- to compare and contrast. He connected with the incomparable Barry Kudrowitz at MIT and thence to a fantastic pool of MIT design-engineering-media faculty and students. After graduating from the groundbreaking TUDelft industrial design program during its early days, Daan co-founded an engineering design consultancy which he built and ran for 15 years. Lured to a faculty role at TUDelft some 6 years ago, he has both run compelling living lab testbeds and other research projects as well as his department overall. His latest role demands thinking holistically about the student experience in toto and about international and collaborative ties. Very interesting indeed! We also talked about how a good technology university can become top-tier, a great topic in this time of new uni development in the BRIC countries and beyond. Finally we considered the potent collaboration between Europe's top TU's -- the IDEA League -- and how they can together disrupt the global league tables and achieve top-tier effectiveness.

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