“When doing science for society leads to the question: what kind of society do we envision and want to support through science? We have to take an ethical stance.”

Caroline Hummels is professor Design and Theory for Transformative Qualities at the department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Her activities concentrate on designing and researching transforming practices with a focus on being-in-the-world theories, embodied interactions, aesthetics, technology-in-becoming, data-enabled design, participatory sensemaking and social resilience. Her quest aims at developing with her team a design-philosophy correspondence, in which not only postphenomenology informs design practice, but also design practice is used to philosophise and to explore, inform and build postphenomenological concepts (i.e., design-informed postphenomenology). She researches and applies these theories in practices with a variety of stakeholders, including e.g. the Provence of North-Brabant, Philips Design, Rijkswaterstaat, Enpuls and ZET.

Caroline is founder and member of the steering committee of the Tangible Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI) Conference, editorial board member of the International Journal of Design, and member of the Dutch Design Week sounding board. Moreover, she has given a large number of keynote speeches, invited lectures and workshops at conferences, international universities and for industry and governmental institutes worldwide.

Caroline Hummels holds cum laude MSc and PhD degrees in Industrial Design from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). After obtaining her PhD in 1993, she took a position as Assistant Professor in the Form Theory group at TU Delft. In 2006, she moved to Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) to take the position of Associate Professor in the Designing Quality in Interaction group and later in 2011 of Full Professor. At TU/e, she also served as Director of Education of the Industrial Design department and of Theme Leader of Participatory Health and Well-being. From 2004-2016 she was founder and owner of ID-dock, a small design research consultancy firm.