Birgitte Geert Jensen is an associate professor in the Institute for Design at Aarhus School of Architecture.

Design has to work in the real world and meet the actual users’ needs. Both in her research and when she is working on design assignments, Birgitte Geert Jensen finds it important to involve the users to the widest extent possible. In accordance with this emphasis on practical applicability, her teaching also emphasises knowledge about entrepreneurship in order to enable the students to take an active, responsible and innovative role in relation to the companies that they will encounter as partners or employers.

Birgitte Geert Jensen heads the participation of Aarhus School of Architecture in the research project Tilgængelig emballage for ældre og funktionshæmmede (Accessible packaging for elderly and disabled users), which began in 2008. The goal of the project is to develop guidelines for industry that make it simpler to produce packaging that everybody can handle. Importantly, this must be achieved without compromising on the other potential functions of packaging such as telling or reflecting a story about the product. The project is based on studies of users’ everyday challenges with difficult packaging and their ways they overcome these obstinate barriers – with or without the use of sharp knives or other potentially risky implements. As most of us will know, elderly or disabled people are not the only consumers who have trouble opening, say, a vacuum pack or a tin of fish. Thus, Birgitte Geert Jensen expects that the project may eventually produce benefits for everybody as well as inspiration for industry. The project is funded by the Danish Enterprise and Construction Agency and runs until 2012. You can read more about the project in the right-hand column. 

Simplifying everyday life and reducing risk have been the purpose of several of the projects that Birgitte Geert Jensen has been involved in. For example, she was involved in the development and design of a product for measuring the skin’s elasticity (for people with the disease scleroderma) as well as a reading device for people with a severe vision impairment. In 2004-2006 she was in charge of the project Handikapvenlige Offentlige Toiletter (Non-disabling public toilets). Another area of interest for her is traffic safety through user-driven innovation.

Birgitte Geert Jensen graduated as an architect and an industrial designer from Aarhus School of Architecture in 2002.