Courses & research | Emerging Technology Design

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 specialisations, the Emerging Technology Design specialisation 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 ETD courses (10 EC)

The ETD-track consists of two compulsory courses, that each student follows. These courses are:

Technology oriented courses (20 EC)

Within ETD, you will choose a technology direction to specialise even further. Each technology direction has a set of courses you can choose from. You need to choose (at least) four of the courses within your direction. Below, you can find some examples of courses per technology direction.

Advanced Materials Engineering (AME)
Biomedical Product Design (BPD)
Product and Surfaces (ProSurf)
Smart Environments & Virtual Reality (SE&VR)
Structural Dynamics, Acoustics & Control (SDAC)
Sustainable Technology for Product Development (STPD)

IDE courses (25 EC)

Next to the (partly) compulsory ETD courses, you can fill up your study programme with 25 EC worth of other IDE courses. You have a lot of freedom in doing this. You can choose to follow other general ETD courses or courses of the other two Master’s tracks within IDE. 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.

Free elective courses (20 EC)

You can fill up the rest of your elective space with any course that is related to IDE, your Master’s track or even other fields. You can choose more courses of IDE, but you can also add courses of other Master’s programmes, at the University of Twente but at other universities as well.

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

master's thesis

You will finish your Master’s 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 and also the technology direction you have chosen. In recent years, students conducted their theses in many different fields, including sports equipment, co-operative robots (cobots), antibacterial surfaces for healthcare sectors and 3D printing for, for example, spinal cages.

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

Developing a transport system for transplant organs that enables perfusion of organs in cooperation with Dutch transplant centres.
Designing a sound beam product that can be attached to exercising machines to incorporate users’ music preference with the exercising routine for Bang & Olufsen.
Developing a lifting aid that anchors itself on rough surfaces and can resist great transverse forces, just like an octopus.

Internship

Do you want to gain more practical skills and experience within the job field by doing an internship? Although it is not incorporated in 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 on which you can choose the topic yourself – and needs approval from the examination board. You 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.

Career perspectives