Casper Boks has a Master degree in Applied Econometrics from Erasmus University Rotterdam, and a PhD degree in Industrial Design Engineering from TUDelft in the Netherlands. After 7 years as assistant professor in the Design for Sustainability Program at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, TUDelft, he moved to Norway NTNU and took a position as Professor of Sustainable Design at the Department of Product design. He already experienced the Nordic working environment when he was visiting professor at the International Institute of Industrial Environmental Economics at Lund University in Sweden, in the autumn 2004 semester.
He belonged to the first wave of ecodesign researchers in the mid-1990s, who focused mostly on end-of-life issues for electronics. Nowadays, his research interests include sustainable product innovation research and education, stretching from design for sustainable behaviour to the organisational and managerial aspects of successful implementation of sustainable product innovation in industry.
In recent years, the research in his group has mainly focused on Design for Sustainable Behaviour; understanding how designers and firms can be facilitated in exploiting opportunities, both environmental and commercial, that may exist in designing products and contexts that make users use products in a sustainable way (or avoid that they use them in an unsustainable way). Three PhD students supervised by Casper wrote their dissertations on this topic: Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Johannes Zachrisson Daae and Kirsi Laitala. Currently, two of Casper’s PhD students focus on behavioural and contextual aspects related to food waste: Marie Hebrok (at SIFO) and Sofie Østergaard (industrial PhD at Norgesmøllene).
Another research interest is related to human factors, such as resistance, empowerment facilitate and information handling, and how they facilitate or complicate sustainable design implementation process in industry. Casper’s former PhD students Elli Verhulst and Silje Aschehoug have addressed these and other issues in their dissertations. As of 2016, Casper is also supervising Raphaëlle Stewart and Faheem Ali, who investigate similar issues in the context of their research (in a joint double-degree project with DTU in Denmark).
