Extra curricular

The department stimulates your participation in exhibitions, awards and conferences because it provides you with an excellent opportunities to expand your curriculum and connections with possible employers. Winning an award will help profile your curriculum when competing for a job. In addition, participating in these events increases the visibility of the department in various rankings. This stimulates the attraction of students, experts and clients, and thereby improves the overall quality of education. 

You are encouraged to visit exhibitions, museums and events, to get a better understanding of how to position yourself in the field of Industrial Design and you should attempt to have your work presented in these exhibitions. The demo days are organized for you to show and demonstrate your project. Demo days are open to the public and provide you with an excellent opportunity to communicate your project and design process to a broader audience and ask specific feedback from various experts. At the same time these days provide coaches with the opportunity to “benchmark” their students’ projects, by comparing them to projects performed by other students. Every year the best student projects will be selected by project coaches to represent our department in exhibitions or competitions. 

Experience from students presenting their project at Automotive UI conference

“We learned a lot from this experience and would advise any student who is working on a project to submit for a conference. Although it could seem thrilling that your work gets evaluated by experts it is a very meaningful experience which really helps you to grow.”

Quinta Bonekamp en Emma van Amersfoorth, B3 students presenting at the AutomotiveUI conference

Financial contribution

With respect to awards and conferences, the department decided to increase impact by focussing its efforts. We encourage and financially support your participation in the awards and conferences indicated below as they are closely connected to our ambitions. You can apply by submitting a research paper or you can participate in the competitions.

Students who win a design contest from Red Dot, iF, or IXD award, or students who are the first author of a paper that has been accepted at TEI, CHI or DIS and plan on attending the event, can receive a financial contribution, consisting of the amount of the registration fee (early bird/student discount). You can apply for this contribution by submitting a request with motivation to ID's Manager ESA, Annaluisa Franco.

Why are the iF and Reddot awards so important?

iF and Reddot are two awards from Germany for exceptional industrial design. These are the world's most famous prizes, which peer review annually on the best designs from around the world. Currently, Samsung is running the list of most iF awards and Philips (the largest employer for ID alumni) is in a desirable second place, but ID alumni can be found in the top 25 companies such as Apple, BMW, or Canon are found wherever work.

In addition to prizes for companies, iF and Reddot also organize prizes for students. First of all, such a prize naturally gives a huge added value to the CV of alumni when applying for jobs in the future. The companies mentioned attach great importance to design prizes. An award is an important marketing tool - a prize gives an employer confidence in their candidate’s capacity.