Mascha Van Der Voort
Mascha van der Voort is an associate professor at the Laboratory of Design, Production and Management of the University of Twente. She is leading the research group on Use Anticipation in Product Design. This group aims at supporting designers in anticipating use within product design processes in order to improve user – product interaction. This aim is pursued by means of the development of new design approaches and tools. The developed design supports particularly focus on gathering and sharing knowledge of product use by (multi-disciplinary) design teams as well as the exchange of this knowledge between designers and stakeholders, in particular end-users. To this purpose the developed approaches and tools are derived from methodologies as scenario based product design, user involvement and participatory design. Techniques as workshops, gaming and virtual reality are often part of these design supports. Concurrently, she has been teaching courses related to human factors, usability and research methods within the Industrial Design Engineering educational program of the University of Twente.