Portfolio · Reflection

How I became this designer

A look back at the work, courses and experiences that shaped my professional identity and vision — and where they are taking me next.

Past

I chose Industrial Design because I never wanted to pick one interest. I was always drawn to many things at once, but with a consistent pull toward technology. In my freelance work at Uw Computerstudent before my bachelor, I worked hands-on with a wide range of IT products and saw how ordinary people struggle with tools whose technical capability outran their usability. This is where parts of my vision found its beginning, especially the belief that aesthetic should not be more important than usability. It also taught me basic professional skills like communicating with clients, setting clear expectations, and being accountable for what I deliver.

My professional identity and vision were shaped throughout my bachelor. Where my vision was still unclear during my first full project, all projects and courses silently contributed to a more matured version. Throughout the projects and courses my specific skill were also developed, like in project 1 where I developed the first scientific research skills, refined my data-skills and worked on my Adobe skills. With project 1, we created an emotion-recognition algorithm and a business model in one concept. Project 2 (Prospect) pushed me into designing for an abstract future and tangible interaction. With that project, I also improved my digital prototyping skills, refined my user-testing skills further and directly improved my Creativity & Aesthetics skills with variable icons through veneer. Project 3 (the VR Resilience Planner) is where my professional skills were tested and refined. With a late start, weak group dynamics, a board year competing for my time, and research that ultimately did not hold up, I learned more about working in groups and doing research than I likely would have in a more successful version of that project.

Two roles outside the curriculum shaped me as much as the projects. My board year as treasurer at C.S.V. Ichthus Eindhoven taught me to manage an association's finances, gather monetary resources through sponsors and write board policy, a process much like designing. Later, I also continued in several committees, like the PR-committee, the Almanak-committee and the IT-committee. All these experiences at Ichthus helped to further develop my Business & Entrepreneurship Expertise and User & Society Expertise. A second formative experience is the experience as a chauffeur at Mobiliteitsdiensten, I experienced interaction across a broad range of car designs firsthand and saw how a poorly placed control is not just inconvenient but can create genuinely dangerous situations. At first, this did not appear as design research, but in hindsight it is an important foundation of both my vision and my Final Bachelor Project.

My internship at the Princess Máxima Centre put me in a real production context: designing for children where direct user testing was impossible (so I learned to observe and roleplay instead), weighing designs against actual production cost, and finally building higher-fidelity prototypes with 3D printing and simulation, which were specific skills that I'd wanted to learn for a long time.

The Final Bachelor Project

In my FBP, every strand of my past converged. The project designs a physical-digital interface for ACC (adaptive cruise control) negotiation, designing for the moment a car's automation and its driver disagree about what should happen. My experience as a chauffeur gave me the domain, my Uw Computerstudent experience gave me the conviction that this cannot be solved with a screen alone, and my technical depth let me actually build it.

The electronics and programming from courses like Creative Electronics and Intelligent Interactive Products, the data and simulation comfort behind my CARLA driving simulation, the 3D-printing and prototyping skills from my internship, and the RTDP design process I had used since Tina came together in one project. By reframing the problem from information display towards negotiation organised the whole project.

My expertise areas

My profile is deliberately unbalanced toward my identity. Technology & Realization and Math, Data & Computing are my depth areas, I use them to quickly move from concept to a working physical prototype, and I am comfortable with electronics, code, data and simulation. User & Society and Business & Entrepreneurship are both areas that were not just developed within my bachelor, but also in experiences outside that. Those outside experiences often shaped my vision on these areas much more than most courses have. My weakest area is Creativity & Aesthetics, though present in most projects, this is honestly not my strongest suit. This is something I plan to keep working on in the future.

My professional skills

I have learned that I tend to underestimate planning and sometimes lack the willpower to hold to a plan once made. Project 3 and my FBP are where that cost me most, and naming it is the first step I have actually taken to manage it. I also know the aesthetic communication of my prototypes often lag behind their technical execution. In teams I gravitate to an execution role, but I will take the lead when no one else holds the direction, as I did in my board year.

Future

I want to keep working at the intersection of tangible interaction and data, on products where getting the interaction wrong has real consequences. An example is the mobility sector, but the principle generalises to any product where technical capability is outrunning usability. My vision of making technology and data legible rather than merely present is the standard I want to hold my future work to.

Concretely, my next learning activities follow straight from my weaknesses. I want to make planning a deliberate, externalised practice rather than something I rely on willpower for. I want to close the gap between my technical and aesthetic execution, so my prototypes communicate as well as they function. And I want to build the business and societal framing that I have so far developed mostly outside my studies into my design work itself. Finally, I want to continue building experience with design, exploring more design methods and making the design methods more natural to me.