My story
Hi, I will tell here a little bit about my beliefs and inspiration behind becoming a designer.
I study Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Within my master, I am focusing on working for and with users, creating experiences and researching their behavior through creating experience prototypes.
Professional Identity
I see myself as a designer who consistently places the human perspective at the center of the design process. Before defining problems or proposing solutions, I focus on understanding the individuals behind them, their beliefs, aspirations, struggles and lived experiences. Only through this understanding can design problems be framed in a way that remains grounded in who will ultimately experience and benefit from the outcome. Throughout my design processes, the users’ perspective functions as a continuous dialogue rather than a single phase, all the way from informing ideation, via guiding technical and strategic decisions till shaping the evaluation. This philosophy is reflected in my previous projects such as Learnum, Uptempo and EDZO, as well as in collaborations with healthcare professionals. Across these projects, my aim has consistently been to enhance well-being, stimulate participation and create opportunities rather than dependencies.
A key strength as a designer is my capacity for empathy. I see myself as capable to listen without judgment, recognize underlying needs, and translate lived experiences into meaningful design insights. This ability is reinforced through my role as a Confidential Contact Person (CCP) for two associations, where trust, sensitivity, and ethical awareness are essential, next to understanding and being able to translate and react accordingly. In parallel, I continue to deepen my understanding of psychology, particularly in relation to my interest target group of people that experience limited cognitive functioning. At the same time, I recognize that my empathic engagement can present challenges. I sometimes experience a certain concern and hesitation when involving users in early-stage testing, out of concern that unfinished prototypes might place an additional burden on them. While I strongly value participatory design approaches, this tension has highlighted an area for growth. I am actively challenging myself to involve users earlier and more openly, trusting both the process of co-creation and the value of prototypes as tools for dialogue rather than finalized solutions.
Another ongoing challenge lies in balancing structure with exploration. My curiosity drives me to investigate multiple perspectives and possibilities in depth, often resulting in interesting findings. However, this can sometimes lead to a loss of focus or difficulty in prioritization. To address this, I consciously create moments of reflections by defining goals, setting endpoints and restoring overview when needed. At the same time, I remain aware that excessive structuring can constrain my creativity, and I continue to search for a balance that allows both rigor and openness.
Ultimately, my professional identity is shaped by the belief that people should be supported based on their abilities rather than defined by their limitations. I am developing myself into a designer who contributes to equity through accessibility-focused, human-centered and empowering design solutions. By collaborating with healthcare professionals, technology developers and users themselves, I am building the skills, mindset and professional autonomy required to contribute meaningfully to my envisioned future society.
Vision
At the core of my vision lies a commitment to contribute to a society in which people are supported in living meaningful, dignified and fulfilling lives, where they live in a harmonious relationship to each other. The future that I envision consists of a large society where people can live simultaneously as autonomous persons with their own values, norms and needs while also supporting one another within the community. Within this future, equity rather than uniform equality is a key principle: people are offered opportunities that respond to their specific circumstances, enabling them to participate and thrive regardless of disability, illness, age, trauma, or other ability impacting factors.
However, I recognize that this envisioned future may remain, in part, utopian due to persistent societal barriers and long-standing patterns of behavior within a broader global perspective. While broader societal transformation is often hindered by exclusionary narratives and resistance towards difference, movements and initiatives demonstrate that meaningful change can emerge within local communities. Such localized shifts have the potential to gradually extend beyond their immediate context (locally towards a national or global level) as perspectives and beliefs become embedded within people.
It is within this space of incremental change that I see a meaningful role for designers. By drawing on behavioral theories and an understanding of psychological motivations, designers can contribute to solutions that respond to how people actually think, feel and behave. Designers could address the societal tendency to strive for full equality instead of understanding the impact of equity over equality. Society consists of unique individuals with overlapping but never identical needs, wants and beliefs. Designing a single solution for everyone risks excluding those whose abilities, motivations, or contexts fall outside a generalized norm. I therefore see the designer’s role as bridging diverse individual needs and shared societal values through situated, specialized, and inclusive solutions that provide comparable opportunities for fulfilment, even if experiences differ in form.
Within this visionary perspective, I view technology as a powerful enabler rather than a goal in itself. Thoughtfully designed technological supportive tools can impact well-being, agency and participation by helping people address challenges such as mental health, physical activity and social connection. However, I am critical of approaches that position technology as the primary driver of innovation. In my design practice, I advocate for a design approach in which technology remains a tool that follows from a deep understanding of users, developed through close collaboration and iterative engagement, like the warm technology approach of IJselsteijn, et al. [1]. Only from this understanding should appropriate technologies be selected or developed, enabling solutions that support dignity, autonomy and self-efficacy.
Underlying this vision is a strong belief that design carries ethical responsibility. Designers have the power to either exclude or empower. Ultimately, my vision is grounded in the belief that people should be supported based on their abilities rather than defined by their limitations, so I see my role as designer to strive to empower people and contribute to a more equitable society through user-centered, responsible design.
[1] W. IJsselsteijn, A. Tummers-Heemels, and R. Brankaert, “Warm Technology: A Novel Perspective on Design for and with People Living with Dementia,” in HCI and Design in the Context of Dementia. Human–Computer Interaction Series., R. Brankaert and G. Kenning, Eds., Springer, Cham, 2020, pp. 33–47. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-32835-1_3.
Future
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