Past
Here I will reflect on the main activities that have made me the designer I am today. Every activity has its learning outcomes and I will relate these past outcomes to my present beliefs and the present-day designer that I am. Although I have attended a lot more courses and electives, I have chosen to elaborate on six of them. These six have clearly steered my Vision, Professional identity, and future design directions.
Honors track Empowerment for Health & Wellbeing
The first activity that has formed my vision and professional identity is an extracurricular one. In the second year, I decided to do an Honors track. In this track, my team and I worked on designing an interactive system that makes people of all ages move more. We were able to set this system up on the Cruyff Courts all around Eindhoven. This project made me realize that physical activity is something that I value when making designs. Physical activity can have many forms, but I know that movement can stimulate the brain to think and reflect. Using physical activity, together with play, can create engaging designs that will spark people’s thinking. In the figure, you can see me working out on the interactive system for the Cruyff Courts. Together with a team of four, we did a lot of activities like presenting and building this system. We got to the finals of the TU/e contest in which we got the opportunity to work on our entrepreneurial skills as well. I liked this opportunity as it made me realize that smooth teamwork makes you trust each other. I was therefore able to do more on the presenting and technical side and my team trusted me to do this. That is why I also believe in the power of good communication and trust within a team.
Responsible Innovation for the world
This USE-learning line was built around responsible innovation. As a group, we had to choose a topic and work for three quartiles on this. We chose to do our research on Woensel (a region in Eindhoven) and it was decided to make a plan to bring education in this region to a higher level. During this project, I learned that teamwork can also be hard. I noticed that some personalities were quite opposite and the way of thinking of our group differed a lot. Although it did hinder me in the beginning, I chose to trust and communicate with them so that our differences would be talked about. Communication was key in this project and I deeply believe that listening, asking questions, and talking openly/empathetically will contribute to a safe working environment.
Project 2
Project 2 was the first project in which I worked within an educational setting. Our project brief was: ‘Create a tool that facilitates reflexive monitoring as a means for different stakeholders to evaluate directional goals to speed up the process of transforming the educational system.’ Although this was quite a broad and complex topic for second-year ID students, we managed to make Samen Spiegelen (see figure). During the project, I realized that it was quite difficult to make such a tool work, but I nevertheless was very interested in the context and design challenge. I felt that we were able to decomplexify parts of this challenge through using design methods and research. Looking back at this project I now believe that as a designer I can make complex issues less complex by implementing designerly ways of doing and thinking. Even people that have never done anything design-related can use this under proper guidance. This project was furthermore a step up in the area of educational design.
Project 3
This project was done in the Seamless Interaction Design Squad. We developed a fidget tool that generates artworks based on the user’s mood and screen time (see image). I deliberately chose this squad as I wanted to develop myself more in the Technology & Realization area. I did a lot of soldering and developing the hardware and software of the fidget. I found it interesting to work on the practical side more and I believe that technology such as AI software in combination with a tangible design can influence how people learn and perceive things for the better. This project also allowed for research as it was a research project. As a team, we therefore read many papers and did user research/testing a lot. It not only made me feel more competent, but it also made the design more robust and reliable. I got to the finding that I liked the structure of this project and that is why I believe in research and the ‘scientific method’. Therefore this project was a start for me to become a theory-informed designer.
Internship Play Learn Change
The activity that has probably been most helpful in developing my vision and identity was my internship at Play Learn Change. Play Learn Change is using design and play methods (e.g. LEGO Serious Play) to make structural changes and innovate within primary and secondary education. During the internship, I made a tool for Play Learn Change so that they would be able to introduce themselves to their clients and go through the process of change with the use of this tool. I not only went through my own, unique design process, but I also got to attend multiple workshops and Vision meetings. It was interesting to use a lot of educational concepts that got handed to me by my colleagues. I liked the way that I could use these concepts in my design so that the design would expose the bottlenecks within a team and constructively talk about them. This internship was focused a lot on design processes, research, making, cooperating, and user research/involvement. I now believe that these main components are typical for me to use when designing. Because of this internship, I furthermore consider parts of the design process and certain design methods to be good at changing someone’s behavior and challenging their thinking.
Intelligent Interactive Products
One activity that has been a good experience for me was the course Intelligent Interactive Products. As I have been developing myself more in the Expertise Areas of User & Society, Business & Entrepreneurship, and Creativity & Aesthetics I wanted to do a course that would challenge me in the Technology & Realization and Math, Data & Computing Areas. In the end, we made an AI-powered product that would help people with social anxiety to calm down in crowded environments. The combination of developing hardware and software and the use of many advanced data analytics techniques was quite overwhelming at the start, but in the end, I managed to build parts of the prototype, work with the learning algorithms (e.g. LSVC and KNN), and also write a paper about the finding (see image). This course made me believe that designers can, with enough time and effort, develop robust prototypes with knowledge about many different fields. Although this course also revealed that hardcore programming and prototyping with electronics is not in my main interest, it also made me aware that using other ways (like wizard of oz) can help a designer in conveying a message.