Soetkin Cornelis
Junior researcher at the research group for Media, Innovation and Contemporary Technologies, Department of Industrial Systems Engineering and Product Design, Ghent University.
Cocreation
Living Labs
Industrial Design
User centred design
Prototyping
Soetkin Cornelis is a design engineer with a strong focus on user-centred design, cocreation and inclusive innovation. She obtained her Master of Industrial Sciences: Industrial Design Engineering at Ghent University Campus Kortrijk in 2024, followed by the Postgraduate Programme in Innovative Entrepreneurship for Engineers.
For her master’s thesis, she developed a product to help active wheelchair users clean their wheels when entering and exiting buildings. The project was driven by a deeply user-centred approach, with cocreation and codesign at its core. Her work earned two ie-net awards and led to a presentation at the ALTER Conference Disability Research for the Real World, where her interest in research and inclusive design further grew.
She previously contributed to the European Horizon 2020 SignON project during an internship at MAC (National Microelectronics Applications Centre, Ireland), where she conducted user testing with the Flemish Deaf community.
Her research interests lie in inclusive design, healthcare innovation and cocreative processes within living labs. She strongly believes that meaningful design emerges from deep user involvement, iterative prototyping and a balanced integration of theory and hands-on experimentation.
In her PhD research, Soetkin focuses on living labs in the healthcare sector and how these processes can contribute to more effective innovation in healthcare.