About me

Jelle van Dijk

MA/Msc Cognitive Science, 2000, Nijmegen, Netherlands
Phd Industrial Design, 2013, Eindhoven, Netherlands.

Master Course: Embodied Interaction (nov-feb)

Reviewer for: ACM-CHI, ACM-TEI (AC), ACM-PD, DRS, Ubicomp, DIS, and others.
Chairing: Work in Progress TEI’16; Graduate Consortium TEI’17

See also my publications

I am a researcher, teacher, writer, speaker and I draw comics. I am an Assistant Professor in Human Centred Design, amazed by people, who they are, what they do, and what they make. In my research I develop the theory of embodied sensemaking and how this and related concepts may help frame the design of physical-digital (‘smart’) products. I teach about this in the master course ‘embodied interaction. In recent years I’ve been involved with designing assistive products for and with autistic people. My aim is to create technology that adds meaning to people’s lives, as seen from the perspective of their own lived experience. I believe you can only do this through participatory- or co-design and so with my research team I develop toolkits and methods for that too. Hopefully we’ll learn more about how to design and use technology in ways that enable people, in all their diversity of being, to be most fully themselves. I am generally interested in phenomenology, embodied cognition theory, participatory design, co-design, participatory innovation, research-through-design, learning, cognitive development, ethnography, ethnomethodology, sensorimotor coupling, traces, skills, scaffolds, social coordination, nonverbal communication. A returning topic concerns the issue of representation (what is it, how can we understand the brain without already assuming mental representation, what do actual representational artifacts (maps, icons) do for us, how do people create representation on the fly as part of social sensemaking, to what extent, if at all, are designed objects representations, in what ways are are representations normative and political and what can we do about it, how can we enable people to create their own, self-empowering representational artifacts, and so on). One burning issue on my wish-list is to be able to say something about all of this in relation to the brain, as I have some education and work-experience in cognitive neuroscience (EEG, fMRI), but up until now have always found the popular theories of brain function to be quite unsatisfactory and incompatible with the embodied perspective.

Twitter: @theblub.

I quit Facebook,

here’s just a few other links:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jelle_Dijk
https://people.utwente.nl/jelle.vandijk
http://dqi.id.tue.nl/jellevandijk/
https://southerndenmark.academia.edu/jellevandijk