Ebba Maria BerggrenPhD student

About me

I am a Ph.D. student at IPD but employed at the University of Gävle where I teach design processes, creativity, and visualization. Before teaching, I worked with industrial design at larger technical companies and news graphics in media.

For my Ph.D. I am researching industrial design education with a focus on defining design competence. Often people think that design competence means being skilled in drawing or forming, and higher education practices are partly also built on that notion. However, my hypothesis is that the core of design competence is mainly about something else. I am approaching design as a specific inquiry process where the designers' perceptual, intellectual, and practical skillsets cooperate in envisioning and realizing a particular future. My thesis is about pinpointing that complex competence in didactic terms with pragmatist conceptions of knowledge as a theoretical framework.

I am a member of the research group Higher Education and Learning Practice (HELP)