Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders is founder of MakeTools and an expert and visionary in pre-design research. She joined the Design Department at The Ohio State University as an Associate Professor in 2011 after having worked as a design research consultant in industry since 1981. She introduced many of the tools, techniques and methods being used today to drive and/or inspire design from a human-centered perspective and has practiced co-designing across all the design disciplines. She speaks and conducts workshops about participatory design research, collective creativity and transdisciplinarity all over the world.
Liz serves as an Associate Editor for Codesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts, and is on the Advisory Board for the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University.
Liz is also the founder of MakeTools, a company that explores new spaces in the emerging design landscapes. Some of her clients have included Apple, AT&T, Coca Cola, Compaq, GE, IBM, Intel, Kodak, Microsoft, Motorola, Procter & Gamble, Roche Diagnostics, Steelcase, Thermos, 3M, and Xerox.
Pieter Jan Stappers is a design professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology. After an education in experimental physics (MSc 1984), Pieter Jan Stappers made the switch to Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft, and followed a research path which led from human perception, spatial imagery, Virtual Reality (PhD in 1992), to design tools and participatory design techniques. Key elements in his work are 'research through design', 'experiential prototypes', contextmapping, which can be found on his webpage (see column on the right).
