Spatial Design Researcher

Help reimagine spatial design by centering justice, care, and imagination at TU Delft

Do you want to help reimagine spatial design by centering justice, care, and imagination? As a researcher at TU Delft, you will play a pivotal role in the project Centering Designing Otherwise.

Job description

The Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft is launching the project Centering Designing Otherwise (CDO). It is a project that challenges the dominance of a single way of teaching and practicing spatial design. Despite the profound crises of climate collapse, growing inequality, and exclusionary politics, spatial design remains too often guided by colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal legacies that prioritize aesthetics, profitability, and spectacle over justice and care. At the same time, design traditions that foreground ecological stewardship, feminist values, or community insurgency are marginalized, treated as secondary, or excluded altogether. The ambition of CDO is to pluralize the center of spatial design discourse by exposing the conditions of dominance, amplifying practices of designing otherwise, and experimenting with the mediums that can make pluralization durable.

The researcher will be at the heart of this project. Their role is not limited to supporting activities but to shaping the intellectual, methodological, and experimental backbone of the work.

The project unfolds in three phases. In the first phase, you will lead desk research and interviews to map historical shifts and contemporary mechanisms of exclusion. You will develop an interpretive framework that will guide the project’s next steps. In the second phase, you will co-design and facilitate the Atelier of Designing Otherwise, an experimental gathering at TU Delft where marginalized practices confront mainstream pedagogies. Here, you will work ethnographically, co-producing knowledge through observation, narrative inquiry, and performative methods, while translating experiences into manifestos, prototypes, and pedagogical tools. In the third phase, you will consolidate findings, identify institutional and cultural conditions for enduring pluralization, and contribute to speculative design work, curricular development, and publications.

Throughout the three years, you will be based at TU Delft and supervised by Dr. Irene Luque Martin. The position offers you the opportunity to conduct in-depth research while also creating tangible interventions that challenge and renew the field of spatial design.

Job requirements

• You hold a Master’s degree (or equivalent professional experience) in architecture, urban design, or a related spatial design discipline.
• You have professional experience in architectural or urban design practice and can critically reflect on its methods, canons, and institutions. You are critical on spatial design agency and their institutional/market dynamics conditions.
• You are familiar with some debates on justice, care, decoloniality, feminist design, ecological urbanism, and/or community-led practices.
• You have experience in organising and facilitating ateliers, workshops, or public events translating research into tangible outputs such as prototypes, pedagogical experiments, exhibitions, or collaborative formats.
• You have excellent communication and writing skills in English, with evidence of publications or equivalent outputs.
• Experience in fundraising, or building collaborations is considered an asset.

TU Delft (Delft University of Technology)

Delft University of Technology is built on strong foundations. As creators of the world-famous Dutch waterworks and pioneers in biotech, TU Delft is a top international university combining science, engineering and design. It delivers world class results in education, research and innovation to address challenges in the areas of energy, climate, mobility, health and digital society. For generations, our engineers have proven to be entrepreneurial problem-solvers, both in business and in a social context.

At TU Delft we embrace diversity as one of our core values and we actively engage to be a university where you feel at home and can flourish. We value different perspectives and qualities. We believe this makes our work more innovative, the TU Delft community more vibrant and the world more just. Together, we imagine, invent and create solutions using technology to have a positive impact on a global scale. That is why we invite you to apply. Your application will receive fair consideration.

Challenge. Change. Impact!

Faculty Architecture & the Built Environment

The Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment has a leading role in education and research worldwide. The driving force behind the faculty’s success is its robust research profile combined with the energy and creativity of its student body and academic community. It is buzzing with energy from early in the morning until late at night, with four thousand people studying, working, designing, conducting research and acquiring and disseminating knowledge. Our faculty has a strong focus on 'design-oriented research’, which has given it a top position in world rankings.

Staff and students are working to improve the built environment with the help of a broad set of disciplines, including architectural design, urban planning, building technology, social sciences, process management, and geo-information science. The faculty works closely with other faculties, universities, private parties, and the public sector, and has an extensive network in the Netherlands as well as internationally.

Conditions of employment

• Duration of contract is 3 years.
• A job of 30-32 hours per week.
• A salary based on scale 10 of the CAO for Dutch Universities with a salary between €2960 - €4670 gross per month based on a fulltime contract (38 hours), plus 8% holiday allowance and an end-of-year bonus of 8.3%.
• An excellent pension scheme via the ABP.
• The possibilty to compile an individual employment package every year.
• Discount with health insurers on supplemental packages.
• Flexible working week.
• Every year, 232 leave hours (at 38 hours). You can also sell or buy additional leave hours via the individual choice budget.
• Plenty of opportunities for education, training and courses.
• Partially paid parental leave.
• Attention for working healthy and energetically with the vitality program.

Additional information

For more information about this vacancy, please contact Dr. Irene Luque Martin, e-mail: i.luquemartin@tudelft.nl