Future Everyday aims at bridging the gap between emerging technologies and people’s everyday life: how to deal with uncertainties that come naturally with new and still evolving technologies, and how to translate them into meaningful products, systems and services that seamlessly blend into everyday life.

The future needs to be tangible and experienceable, to be understandable

The cluster Future Everyday conducts research to understand, explore, and shape the everyday life of individuals and small groups, which encompasses the new reality of living, commuting, and working, with routines, rituals, and many nuances, in spaces that are becoming more continuous, dynamic, experiential, and responsive in the future with emerging technologies. We design and analyse the touch-points where humans and technologies meet and extend into each other – the permeable membrane between a system of technologies and a system of people. In the cluster Future Everyday, we carry on the proud tradition of the department to be always in the forefront of experimenting with emerging technologies. We currently focus on technologies such as internet of things, wearables and soft things, additive manufacturing, small and local data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, while exploring into smart materials and bio-materials.

We believe that the future needs to be tangible and experienceable, to be understandable. Therefore, we use a research-through-design approach to design for aesthetics in the future everyday, making use of labs for making and labs for experiencing. At the most concrete level, we define the characteristics of future everyday designs by creating demonstrators, which show how a specific emerging technology might seamlessly blend into people’s everyday lives. At a more abstract level, we generate methods, theories, frameworks and tools, which help designers and researchers understand, create and reason about future everyday designs. Finally, at the highest level of abstraction, we synthesize a unique way of working with emerging technologies in general, which involves the mentioned methods, theories, frameworks and tools, and leads to meta-strategies that can be disseminated through design activities, corporate strategies and entrepreneurships. 

Aligning with the focus areas of TU/e and the EuroTech universities, we focus on the contexts of the Smart Home, Mobility, and Workplace, Health and Wellbeing, and Energy and Sustainability. To enable innovation and to achieve impact, we also conduct research on design management, corporate innovation strategies and design entrepreneurships. We have strong collaborations with enterprises such as Philips, IKEA, NXP, Océ, and Toyota, SMEs, hospitals, research institutes as well as, design studios such as Van Berlo Studio and Philips Design.