Prof. Dr. Ir. Wim A. Poelman, Monday, June 16, 2014
Master assignment:
Project na me:
Ability Design
The policy of the Dutch government is to transfer people with employment restrictions from
protected, social enterprises to regular working environments.
A problem is that organizations are, in general, reluctant to employ people with a handicap.
Problems are the needs for adapting workstations and the need for coaching.
Although employment of people with a handicap is subsidized by the government, it is still not easy
to create enough jobs for them.
The goal of this research project is to find out if industrial design engineering as a discipline could
help solving this problem which is related only partly to physical constrains and mainly to mental
constrains.
First of all by investigating constrains, leading to the failure in employing people with a handicap and
secondly by designing concept solutions for these constrains.
These solutions might be related to physical supports and adaptation of working environments as
well to IT solutions like virtual coaching, telepresence and serious gaming.
Living Lab
The research will be carried out in a living lab environment being the Inclusief Groep in Nunspeet.
The Inclusief Groep is a social enterprise, as well as an employing and coaching company. In fact this
assignment could be regarded as a concept development of products and services the Inclusief Groep
could offer their clients in the future.
The assignment includes:
- Acquisition of qualitative and quantitative information about the potential user-group.
- Identification and selection of constrains to be studied in this project.
- Acquisition of knowledge about these constrains
- Generation of concept solutions
- Selection of concept solutions
- Design of experiments to test these solutions
- Testing of solutions
- Evaluation
- Reporting
Contactpersons are Prof. Wim Poelman and Ass. Prof. Johan Molenbroek
Wim Poelman, w.a.poelman@tudelft.nl tel. 06-81494899
Johan Molenbroek, j.f.m.molenbroek@tudelft.nl tel. 015-2783086