“We assume that people can be seduced to certain activities if the design incorporates playful features, such as appealing to curiosity and providing challenges.”

Tilde Bekker is Professor of Digital Technologies for Playfulness and Motivation. Bekker is interested in designing playful interactions between multiple people and multiple objects in contexts of play, health and learning. Bekker's research interests include designing tools for teachers and students, intelligent playful solutions for children and older adults, developing and evaluating design techniques for involving users in (early) design and providing support for design practitioners for selecting and tailoring design techniques to specific design projects.

She teaches and does research in the area of interaction design for children and elderly; more specifically, on user centered design methods, designing for physical and social activities and designing for playful learning. She has a background in industrial and interaction design, with a focus on conducting theory-informed design research.

Bekker developed the Developmentally Situated Design tool (with Professor Alissa Antle, SFU, Canada) now used by many international universities to teach Interaction Design and Children and which won a best-practice award in 2014. She is co-editing a special issue on 'Designing for Play as Cultural Participation in Childhood' for Conjunctions - Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation.

Tilde Bekker obtained her MSc and later her PhD in Industrial Design at Delft University of Technology. She defended her dissertation about user interface design practice in 1995. After a postdoc at the University of London, UK, Bekker settled at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) - first as Assistant Professor, then as manager of the educational domain of Playful Interactions and currently as Full Professor. In December of 2017, she was awarded a Honorary Professorship at the Lab for Design and Play of Designskolen Kolding, Denmark, for her collaboration on education and research there.

Bekker has been a long-term editorial board member for the International Journal of Child Computer Interaction. She is very active in organizing international conferences and workshops on computer-human interaction.

• TU Delft
• Designskolen Kolding

Squad: Games and Play

Exemplary graduation projects of students I coached
Koen Scheltenaar: LOEP, design of a playful educational tool
Bernice D’Anjou: A Peripheral Data Visualisation System as support for high school teachers
Annemiek Veldhuis:  CoDa , Exploring collaborative graph sense-making through data physicalizations in Dutch secondary project-based education
Thijs Roeleven: Augmented Playground (2017)

Research focus, project topics I’d like to coach

"Designing tools for students and or teachers", e.g. designing tools that empower students to follow a self-directed learning path in a Design-Based or Challenge-Based learning context, and that empower teachers to create and facilitate and monitor open-ended learning contexts. 

“Design for (inclusive) play", e.g. designing playful solutions to support social interactions between children. This direction is often done in close collaboration with the Design School Kolding, the Play Lab, Denmark. I am also interested in tools for students and teachers to support Design-Based Learning, for these projects we often collaborate with the Eindhoven School of Education.”

Vision on education/coaching
“I think education and the collaboration between students and coaches works best if they each have an interest in some aspect of the educational activity (e.g. project). For example, if the topic or approach is closely related to the expertise and interest of the coach, they are also more motivated to put in extra effort in the coaching. I try to coach depending on the goals of the student to balance between (expertise area) learning goals and project goals. I also try and engage the students that I coach in my stakeholder network.”