Daniel Saakes is a trained design engineer with over 20 years of experience making highly interactive prototypes. He is presently associate professor at the University of Twente's Engineering Technology faculty. Before that, he was an associate professor at KAIST, and an assistant professor at the Delft University of Technology. Other work experiences includes a visiting position at MIT Media Lab, Japan Science and Technology Agency, and Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden.
He serves as the scientific director of 4TU Design United and is a steering committee member of the ACM Tangible Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI) conference.