Senior Associate
Delft, The Netherlands
Contact: ivanzeumeren@cityfi.co
BIO
lse van Zeumeren is a Senior Associate at Cityfi's European office, where she combines human-centered design with a strategic mindset. Through service design and strategic interventions, she stimulates a natural shift towards new innovations, turning cities and their citizens into confident adopters. She’s also co-founder of sCOOL2walk, a community-led active mobility program for schools.
Prior to joining Cityfi, Ilse worked at The Future Mobility Network, a Dutch consultancy, where she shaped inclusive mobility strategies for both public and private sector clients through research by design: testing innovations in real-life conditions, uncovering their effects on accessibility, livability, health, and public adoption.
Through this role, she was embedded within the Municipality of Rotterdam as a Senior Service Design Consultant, applying participatory and co-design methods to bring a human-centered perspective into Rotterdam's mobility transition.
Before that, Ilse worked in academia, where she led the research and design for Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI) in autonomous driving at the Human-Centered Design department of Delft University of Technology.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Design Engineering and a Master of Science in Design for Interaction, from Delft University of Technology, and has completed additional training in Social Psychology.
Ilse is based in Delft, an idyllic Dutch city in the Rotterdam–The Hague metropolitan area.
GET TO KNOW ILSE
What do you do for fun?
Analogue photography. As a service designer, I'm drawn to process almost as much as outcome, and this reflects that perfectly: getting the settings right, taking your time, starting over, framing a scene, experimenting. It changes how you see cities and walk the streets: you slow down, noticing angles, light, people’s interactions, and details high above or right in front of you.
What transportation innovation excites you the most?
High-speed sleeper trains. They quietly stitch together countries, covering the distance while you sleep. And instead of racing the plane on speed, they win on comfort, a private cabin, waking up somewhere new, and become part of the joy of the trip itself.