PAST

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

During my bachelor Industrial Design I have developed myself in different areas of expertise. You can find the development of all the areas together with my personal growth gained from projects, courses and extracurricular activities.

CREATIVITY AND AESTHETICS

An attractive product will do better in the market than a product that only functions but is not beautiful. In the years of my bachelor Industrial Design, I followed several courses in which this was a part of the learning objectives. From Idea to Design has laid the foundation for different types of iteration techniques and hands-on prototyping. During my first project, I got to learn different brainstorming techniques to search for problems or bottlenecks or to come up with solutions for a specific problem, which I have used in later projects as well. Think of brainwriting, reversed brainstorming, mind mapping, role play. Moreover, I have learned to use different skills to communicate ideas, make aesthetic choices for the final design through sketching, low-fi prototyping. I learned this sketching skills during my course of exploratory sketching, where I developed in sketching different perspectives, shading, communicating through sketches with supporting text. Designing programs as Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop have enabled me to digitally communicate ideas or concepts. I especially learned this during my internship by making email headers and have further processed this acquired knowledge in making annual flyers for Personal Project, and posters for projects. Furthermore, I have learned to always keep the target group in mind when looking at the aesthetic choices. If designed for a child (project 2), the prototype should fit their interest and lifestyle. However, if designing for an adult (project 1 and 3), the prototype should look different as well, compared to a child. You design for the target group, for yourself. Besides aesthetics, interaction is an important perspective of a design as well. To explore with interaction, I have made use of different creativity techniques such as experience prototyping, interaction relabelling, extreme characters, during the course Aesthetics for Interaction and Designing for the Everyday.

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Electronics

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TECHNOLOGY AND REALIZATION

I think that technology and realization is an important part of a design process to communicate and demonstrate interactions and ideas by combining technology and material. To realize this, I developed my expertise with coding the electronics and making the circuit of prototypes with an Arduino in Processing and thus how to make interactive systems for design projects during the courses Creative Electronics, Project 1 and Project 2. Furthermore, I gained knowledge about HTML and CSS during my internship and part-time job by designing and coding emails based on psychology. In conclusion, I can say that I have the basic skills, but I still have a lot to learn on this expertise area by applying this knowledge to new projects. Not only did I realize prototypes using electronics, but also by physically create prototypes with different material. Because of this I have not only improved in the inner body but also in the appearance of the products, taking into account the interaction between user and product.

Electronics
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USER AND SOCIETY

Users and society have a huge role in design. In my opinion, designs need to create value for people and create impacts in everyday life. To achieve this, the user experience needs to be implemented in the design and the designer needs to search for the effects on both the user and society. The course User-Centered Design has laid the foundation for me to understand the usability and user experience and how to find out, where Socio-Cultural Sensitivity has made me realize that within each group there are different cultural perspectives and values and that this should also be acted upon as a designer. Moreover, working with a specific target group, from children to adults, during my projects gave me experience and taught me how to deal with different age groups.

BUSINESS AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP

It is important to identify the needs of the target group or society before a product is brought to or is already on the market. I believe that this is the only way to make a product successful. This will not happen without a demand from the target group. To learn about these aspects, I have followed and succeed the courses Introduction to Business Design, Buyer Behaviour & Innovation, Fundamentals of Product Innovation, and Designing Business Processes. During these courses, I learned the different aspects what should be taken into account during the design processes related to business, and the consumer behaviour and marketing specifically. Moreover, I gained new knowledge from the course Fundamentals of Product Innovation on the field of consumer behaviour, in which I learned product innovation processes and methods within different organizations. All in all, I can conclude that these aspects are necessary to make products outstanding from the start or to optimize companies.

MATH, DATA AND COMPUTING

Starting the study Industrial Design, the knowledge of this expertise area was limited. However, this has gradually increased by taking the different courses Data Analytics, Making Sense of Sensors, and Statistics. I have learned the basics skills of Python in the course Data Analytics, where I had to process, analyse and draw conclusions from a large amount of data with accompanying visualizations through graphs. Moreover, I have developed in the field of collecting and converting my own data in the course Making Sense of Sensors by measuring physical activity in office workers with a Mi Fit. Conclusions could be drawn after analysing this data in python. I learned the entire process from collecting data to processing after which conclusions could be drawn. I took the statistics course last of the three, in which I was able to apply the acquired knowledge and gain more in-depth knowledge in the field of descriptive statistics, statistical inference for two samples, simple linear regression and correlation, and multiple linear regression. In a next project, I want to use on-body sensors to apply the in-depth knowledge to my own collected data.

PROFESSIONAL SKILLS

My professional skills have increased significantly over the years. This is mainly due to my board year at E.S.V.V. Hajraa as commissioner of competition. As responsible person for all volleyball related matters, both internal and external communication played a major role. This made me learn to adapt my communication for the target group. Furthermore, this complex role within the board has contributed to making it easier for me to create an overview when situations are complicated. I have also done multiple committees within my volleyball association, which contributed to function properly in a multidisciplinary team. Forces must be joined, and opinions respected to achieve a good and efficient working atmosphere.

Besides, I have had a presentation at the Kazerne about my research project where I showed the audience the project together with my teammate. Exposing myself by presenting in my non-native language was making me nervous, but the only way to overcome this is to just do it. This has made it easier for me to speak in public has given me more confidence through the trust of others and the outcome of the presentation.