Wim van der Hoek Award celebrates 20th anniversary
The Wim van het Hoek award (also known as the Constructors Award) was introduced in 2006 to mark the 80th birthday of the Dutch doyen of design engineering principles, Wim van der Hoek (1924-2019).
Under the auspices of DSPE, the award named after him is presented each year to the person with the best graduation project in the field of design in mechanical engineering at a Dutch or Belgian university of technology or university of applied sciences. Traditionally, the award ceremony takes place in November, at the end of the second day of the Precision Fair, the annual highlight of the Dutch precision engineering community.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the Wim van der Hoek Award, we will dive into history by posting interviews (in Dutch) with previous winners. These interviews were published by Dutch professional mechanical engineering magazine Constructeur, which kindly gave permission for republication. The winners talk about their engineering interests and education, starting from their childhood, and on their professional career thus far, reflecting on Wim van der Hoek’s design principles and the impact of the award.
In 2016, Niels van Giessen was the 11th winner, the first one to graduate from a university of applied sciences, Avans in Den Bosch (NL). His graduation project involved the design of a robot arm in which special attention had been devoted to the construction of the ‘wrist’; according to the jury it was an excellent example of the application of well-known precision design principles. After obtaining his Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at TU Eindhoven, Van Giessen became a design engineer at Settels Savenije in Eindhoven (NL).
Please check the full interview from 2021, either the original Dutch version or the English translation, and Van Giessen’s 2026 retrospect, ‘Looking back, five years later’.
