About

I'm Dr. Willem van der Maden, a researcher at the IT University of Copenhagen. In a nutshell, I work on the design of AI systems for human flourishing.

By design, I mean I approach AI from a sociotechnical perspective: not just model development, but the whole system where technology meets society. By human flourishing, I mean steering AI so it genuinely helps people thrive, whether that's through better workflows, improved wellbeing, or more meaningful experiences.

In practice, this means I study how people actually build and evaluate AI products. My current research focuses on how practitioners evaluate LLM-based systems in production, where the real decisions happen and where we can anticipate problems before they scale.

I teach AI for Designers at the bachelor level and Datafication and Representation at the master level at ITU Copenhagen. My work draws on HCI, design research, and mixed methods to bridge the gap between what AI can do and what people actually need it to do.