Courses & research | Human Technology Relations

During your Master’s in Industrial Design Engineering (IDE), you will collect 120 EC within two years. The first year and the first quartile of the second year consist of compulsory and elective courses. You will spend the final three quartiles of your Master’s working on your master’s thesis.

European Credit Transfer System

Student workload at Dutch universities is expressed in EC, also named ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System), which is widely used throughout the European Union. In the Netherlands, each credit represents 28 hours of work.

Courses

Just like the other two Master’s tracks, the Human Technology Relations track offers you a lot of freedom to make your own choices. In total, you will collect 75 EC worth of courses. Which courses you are going to follow, is mainly up to you. Roughly speaking, you can draw up your own curriculum around the following components:

Mandatory HTR courses (30 EC)
The HTR-track consists of six compulsory courses, that each student follows. These courses are:
Elective courses (45 EC)
You fill up the rest of your elective space with elective courses related to your Master’s track, other Master’s tracks within IDE or even courses from for example Communication Studies, Philosophy of Science or Interaction Technology. Also, you can choose to follow a Capita Selecta, of which you can choose your study topic yourself. You can do this as a preparation for your master’s thesis, for example. Your subject needs approval of the examination board. Below, you can find some examples of elective courses per Master’s track.
- Human Technology Relations
  Brand Management
  Embodied Interaction
  Graphic Language of Products
- Emerging Technology Design
  Sources of Innovation
  Surface Engineering for Look and Feel
  Durability of Consumer Products
- Management of Product Development
  Governing Product Development
  Packaging Design & Management I
  Product Life Cycle

Or plan an online meet-up with a student and gain first-hand experience!

Master's thesis

You will finish your Master’s in IDE with your master’s thesis, which is worth the remaining 45 EC. The majority of the IDE students complete their graduation project at an external organisation. The choice of your specific graduation subject is largely up to you. There are many research areas you could focus on, such as packaging design, interaction design, product market relations or human-centred design. You will focus on researching and/or designing possible solutions that can improve people’s lives, whether it’s on an individual, social or societal level.

Your Master's thesis could involve undertaking projects such as:

Designing a car seat inlay for premature infants that are too small to fit in usual infant carriers.
Designing a conceptual interactive playset for the public outdoor environment.
Researching the possible influence of packaging design on sustainable consumer behaviour.

Internship

Do you want to gain more practical skills and experience within the job field by doing an internship? Although it is not incorporated into the curriculum, you have the opportunity to add an internship to your Master’s. You can add this within a Capita Selecta, which is a course of which you can choose the topic yourself – and needs approval from the examination board. You will earn 5 EC by doing this. It means you have to complete part of your internship on your own time. Many of these industrial assignments are executed in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Project Center at the University of Twente. Consult your track coordinator for your options.

During your internship, you could focus on different kinds of subjects within the field of Industrial Design Engineering. For example, you could concentrate on:

Design at agencies such as PCV Group or D’Andrea & Evers;
Product development at companies such as Yalp or Nedap;
Product or consumer research at companies such as Proximus or Newcom;
Marketing of brands such as Grolsch or Bug-a-boo.

Career perspectives