Ena Voûte stops as Dean of IDE

Voûte took the position of Dean of Industrial Design Engineering, where she studied in the 1980s, in September 2012. After her studies, she started working at Unilever where she developed launching, brand and marketing strategies for products such as Magnum, Becel and Lipton in several European countries. She then became Marketing Director at Independer, the financial comparison site, and worked as an innovation consultant at Altuïtion. This was followed by nine years at Philips in different positions and countries.

In her 10 years as Dean, Voûte has left her mark on the fairly new Faculty of IDE that turned 50 in 2019. During the anniversary celebrations (in Dutch), Voûte noted that the research areas had changed quite dramatically over the years. “Products are no longer stand-alone but are part of a larger whole of products and services. The context has become more important.”

Practical work
This is reflected in the new Industrial Design bachelor’s that started in 2021. Greater emphasis is now put on dealing with major societal challenges, practical work, action learning and designing products such as services or products as part of a system. Under Voûte’s leadership, the Faculty started looking at research areas such as maintaining vitality while aging and the circular economy.

Apart from her position as Dean at TU Delft, Voûte is also the Chair of the Recognition & Rewards Perspective Committee that published a report on this subject in June last year. At the time she told Delta that a ‘major change in culture’ was needed in the way in which scientists are judged. “The focus should not be on the quantity, but on the quality of research. Quality also implies that you make the data accessible for others. And this is part of how you connect research to education and valorisation.

Vacancy
Voûte also led the work and welfare taskforce that monitors the well-being of students and staff during the pandemic and that also looks at what employees envision their ideal work week to be (Half at home). The IDE Dean is also the Chair of the Board of the Robovalley Foundation and is a member of the Supervisory Board of the University of Applied Sciences for the Arts in Utrecht.

What Voûte will do after leaving her position as Dean has not yet been made known. The IDE Faculty is looking for a successor and has issued a vacancy (in Dutch). It has also hired the Lumen recruitment bureau to help look for a new dean for ‘the most prominent position in a Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering in the academic world’.