Past
Before I started studying at the Department of Industrial Design at the Technological University of Eindhoven, I did not have much experience with design. In my high school, I had a design course for 8 weeks. A course focused on the creativity and aesthetics of design, with the aim of upcycling old compartments. The result for most people was turning a table into a chair or the other way around. On the other side, there was me, I turned an analog phone into a charging station for my mobile phone. This showed me that I was capable of thinking outside of the box. I liked the aspect of turning old concepts/ things into new ones.
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In my free time, I love to play the piano and I’m a composer as well. I love to use my creativity to make music, as well as put my creativity to practical use. This is why I chose to study industrial design. I like the aspect of combining creativity with technology.
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In the next part, I will break down my development for each of the areas of expertise. To the right you can see an overview of my curriculum. And below you can see my development for each year.
Creativity & Aesthetics
Contributing courses:
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From idea to design
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Exploratory Sketching
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Digital craftsmanship
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Aesthetics of interaction
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Internship
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Project 1,2,3
Before my bachelor's, I had little to no classes in aesthetics. I followed art class for 2 years in high school but that wasn't that resourceful. However, I also had lessons at the music school where I learned how to express my creativity through music.
From idea to design was the first design course I followed at this university. This course opened my eyes. For the first time, I was asked to think outside of the box. I learned the very basic principles of design. My design, Amica, is a talking display stand.
Before taking this course, I had difficulty communicating my ideas to others. To learn how to communicate visually I decided to enroll in the exploratory making. During exploratory sketching, I learned the basics of making sketches and also learned how to use it as a tool to explore my creativity. Now, I can communicate what I'm thinking in my head and I can translate this into something on paper.
Digital craftmanship focuses on different digital production techniques. In this project, my focus was on the digital creation of smocking patterns. Throughout the course there was a lot of focus on data, gathering data, and translating this into a design. My main insights were that everything around us can be documented and everything can be used as inspiration for design. Our final design featured data on how confident I was growing up in my teens. This data was then abstracted and designed for me to be able to understand it.
Aesthetics of interaction was a coursed focussing on the interaction with products. For this course, I had to design an alarm clock. Instead of thinking of a functional design, I started focussing on good and beautiful interaction. Instead of thinking about how can this work and how can this be manufactured, the main focus was on creating interesting interactions.
During all of my projects, I have always had a role in the graphic design and branding of a project. This is because graphic design has always been a big interest of mine. This was also the reason I joined UNID in my second year. Throughout my bachelor’s, I have mastered many different adobe programs such as photoshop, illustrator and InDesign. But I have also explored programs such as Figma, and processing.
User & Society
Contributing courses:
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User-centered Design
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USE Behavior Change Technologies
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Design research
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Internship
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Project 1,2,3
User-centered design was my first introduction to designing for users. This course taught me how to do surveys, conduct and analyze interviews and make personas.
My USE basics course focussed on behavior change technologies. The course focused on the ethical implications of technology. This was my first time learning about ethics and the repercussions of implementing technology in society.
Design research was a course on how to do research through design. In this course, I did an extensive user study on the benefits of taking bites simultaneously. During this research, my focus was on qualitative data collection and combining this with quantitative data.
During my internship, I built a drum sequencer with a layered interface. This means that the interface seems easy at first, but by pressing different buttons in combinations new functions arise. These functions are harder to find but are also more difficult to use. To test this I had user tests with multiple different target groups to see if the different targets would find the different layers of the interface and if this was not too confusing.
For projects 1, 2 and 3 I conducted user studies. In project 1 DIY Chores, I tested multiple cleaning games on effectiveness. During project 2 I tried multiple user research techniques. The project started with data gathering by joining target users in their meetings and observing them. Then later the design was tested by putting it in these target user meetings and by observing the changes. Afterward, the participants were all asked to fill in a questionnaire and there was a group discussion with willing participants.
