S.E. Wildevuur (Sabine)

Sabine E. Wildevuur is director at DesignLab. DesignLab - being student-driven by the DreamTeam - is an ecosystem at UT to experiment, pioneer and innovate to deal with the demands of a fast-changing society. Its' goal is to translate societal challenges into research questions and practical outcomes, envisioning and exploring the interactions between society and technology and actively engaging and involving all societal partners in the process. The main focus areas of DesignLab are: Responsible Design and Citizen Science, which are approached in a transdisciplinary manner.

Wildevuur has a degree in Medicine and Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since the emergence of the Internet, the overlap between Information and Communication Technology and healthcare has become Wildevuur’s focus of attention. She worked for several years for the Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG). In 2000, Wildevuur founded her own company, Like Wildfire, which focused on Science & New Media and worked with organizations such as Doctors without Borders, Dutch Journal of Medicine, MedicInfo, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

In 2003, she was appointed the Head of the Internet Unit at the headquarters of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi (Kenya). In 2004, she started her research on collaborations between scientists and artists, specifically in the field of medical visualisations. As a result, her book Invisible Vision: Could Science learn from the Arts? was published by Bohnn, Stafleu & Van Loghum 2009), supported by the foundation of the Dutch medical journal Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde. During her research for this book, Wildevuur was affiliated with the University of Oxford, as a fellow with the Centre for Visual Studies, and the University of Maastricht.

In 2007, Sabine Wildevuur was approached to set up the CARE lab at Waag, Institute for Science and Technology in Amsterdam. With the CARE team, she has been setting up and leading ‘innovative’ transdisciplinary projects within the domain of health and care and technology, together with users. Several projects addressed the issue of an ageing society, which led to the co-written book Connect: Design for an Empathic Society (BIS Publishing, 2013).

One of her aims is to disseminate knowledge on transdisciplinary research and the added value of design thinking to tackle societal challenges. Since she strongly believes in the dissemination of such knowledge, she has curated several exhibitions on the role of design in health: Designing Health (2013), Designing a Healthy Future (Dutch Design Week, 2017), and Chronic Health: If not us then who (Dutch Design Week, 2018). She is one of the founders of the Embassy of Health (Dutch Design Foundation).

At VU University Amsterdam she conducted research on 'Designing information and communication technology to enable person-centred care in chronic disease management'.