Three PhD scholarships in Usability and Interaction design

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label Burse autorenew 2025-09-29, 17:01 history_edu Silviu Marinescu
DTU Management Engineering is offering one or more PhD scholarship(s) in the area of design and new product development. The PhD students will be attached to the newly formed division of Technology and Innovation Management. The division is expanding significantly during the years to come and is organised within three research themes: Industrial Dynamics & Strategy; Entrepreneurship; and Design Engineering & Innovation. The PhD students will belong to the Design Engineering & Innovation group.

Responsibilities and tasks
The PhDs will be based on one of the following topics:



1) Rapid usability assessment at the early stages of design. The project is expected to advance knowledge of how to identify the key usability factors of products at the early stages of product development process, partial assessment of products, and investigate how to transfer the obtained information to designers in order to enhance the creative process of idea generation and problem solving. The purpose is to reduce the product development cycle. A model/tool to support companies with assessing usability is expected to be produced and evaluated.

2) Assisted generation of shapes for products/ Shape grammars. This project aims to investigate the creation of shapes for products targeting different emotions or perceptions through the use of computer programs. The research project is expected to explore the areas of emotional design and perception. The PhD is expected to result in a computational tool that enables the random generation of shapes that follow a set of requirements in order to create new products, is expected to be the outcome. Different application areas will be investigated.

3) Requirements for emerging markets. This project aims to investigate the requirements of products to be successful in emerging markets. This will involve the analysis of products (and possibly users), platform & modular design, as tools to adapt the products to the new market needs. Design methods and processes used in emerging markets are of interest to the western world. The outcome of the project is expected to be a design method to support the design of products for emerging markets. An additional outcome would be guidelines on how to adapt the methods from the emerging markets.