Past
You can never predict where you’ll end up, but looking back it’s always perferctly clear how you became the person you are today. Looking back at my past, I can also see where my interests and passions of today have come from. Here follows an insight into that past and how it led me to become an Industrial Designer
Childhood
My passion for creating and designing can be traced back to my childhood. It started out with my holidays to the beaches of Belgium and the green hills of the Eiffel in Germany. Here I played outside all day. I built big sandcastles on beaches and dikes in rivers. I crafted tools such as swords and bows. My love for nature and being outside has never left me and this plays an important role in my motivation to not only pursue opportunities for a future world, but also to maintain the beautiful things already existing today.
At home, there was never a lack of LEGO lying around. I built all the things I could imagine with my brother. Houses, boats, products and even more technical parts such as guns that could shoot rubber bands. To this day I use LEGO for some of my prototypes as it’s a useful and easy to use ‘tool’ for this purprose.
Another one of my favorite activities was building forts out of matresses and pillows to have Nerf battles with my friends. While seemingly unimportant in my development as a designer, it was the first time that I practiced strategizing, coordinating and working with others to accomplish a goal. These skills turned out to be very important in my professional identity.
I’ve let myself be inspired by movies such as Robots, Star Wars, Wall-E and other science fiction comics. These movies showed me that the world doesn’t have to stay how it is. The world can be changed for better or worse by people. In fact, the movie Robots inspired me to become an inventor. I ‘invented’ things such as jet packs and magnetically levitating cars. While I designed them in incredibly unrealistic fashion, it does show how I was already dreaming and thinking about bigger things.
Teenagehood
If my childhood would be characterized as physical playing and learning, then my teenagehood would be the opposite. Digital playing and learning. I got my first laptop when I was 10 and it opened a whole new world that was previously unknown to me.
Between the ages of 8 and 15, I played many video games but none were as transformative to me as Minecraft. While it seems weird to talk so highly of a video game, I truly believe it played an important role in my development as a designer. The possibility to realize any world I could imagine was very appealing to me. I practiced building a lot and became pretty good at it. Doing this helped me to see ideas more visually in front of me. Around this time, I also got to know a lot of new people who also played Mincraft. Together we created a server which eventually hundreds of players enjoyed. During this project, I learned first hand how to form a team, communicate and design with the end user in mind. Moreover, I also started programming at the age of 13 to create plugins for the server. This skill is still valuable to this day.
Minecraft wasn’t enough when it came to visualizing my ideas. That’s why I started teaching myself how to 3D model in Blender at the age of 14. It has been a slow and painful process, but it has brought me to the level where none of my projects remain untouched by 3D visualizations.
In my second year of high school, I started following the course of Technasium. This is a course where you collaborate with an existing company on an existing problem to work out innovative solutions. I was instantly hooked as it combined all the passions and skills I’ve collected since my childhood. It allowed me to create things, envision future worlds, work together with others and visualize our ideas.
It was not long after my first project that I started acting as a leader figure in my team. Under my lead, we have delivered concepts that I’m still proud of to this day.
Present
This section covers the development I have undergone throughout the school year of 2019 - 2020 with a focus on my development since my latest Personal Development Plan. This file can be downloaded here.
Expertise areas
Technology and Realization
Before I started studying Industrial Design, my projects hardly left the digital atmosphere to take form in a physical prototype. Coding wasn’t the issue but my lack of experience in using electrical components and construction tools was. This has changed drastically since then. During the course of Creative Programming, I chose to change my mindset. Instead of worrying about the things I didn’t know, I would start with the elements I did know. I learned that I was capable of making a lot more than I thought. My knowledge about electrical components and Arduino expanded thanks to this newly found confidence.
When it comes to realization, I learned how to make my projects more in-depth. My projects used to lack the sort of research and execution that would make the concepts more realistic. Especially in Project 1, I’ve been able to take the next step. My team and I involved multiple external companies and experts for the development of our project. This has led our concept, LightMeUp, to reach a level where it might get picked up by one of these external companies for further development.
Creativity and Aesthetics
What I learned most in this expertise area is to follow a systemic approach to ideation and brainstorming. Coming up with ideas used to come from spontaneous insights with a lack in underlying arguments. While I do believe that creativity has to remain spontaneous in a way, I’ve come to realise what the benefits can be of taking a systemic approach. What changed even more in my creative process is what comes after ideation. Iteration. Many of my previous projects presented concepts that were thought up in the first weeks and hardly altered since then. Project 1 was an iterative project like I haven’t experienced before. The quality created has a lot to thank to this iterative process.
Aesthetics is a difficult expertise area for me to talk about. I believe that aesthetics is a feeling and thus cannot be taught or learned. A good aesthetic feeling must come from practice and experience. That is why it’s hard for me to see significant improvement. However, I have been letting myself get inspired by great industrial designers of the past (through documentaries, books, museums) and I have been trying to create my own design style in my projects.
Business and Entrepreneurship
I got to practice this expertise area in courses such as From Idea to Design, Disruptive Technologies, Introduction to Business Design and Project 1. Still, the real lessons happened outside of the courses. In October 2019, I joined the staff of TU/e innovation Space. It’s a highly entrepreneurial environment which has taught me a lot. I got to observe student teams and learn how they operate. I am part of a highly motivated and close-knit team. The work environment gave me a first insight into the operations of a tech/design company. innovation Space has been a source of inspiration on how I would like to give shape to my future company.
Besides innovation Space, I also attended network events (including an event organized by Lucid and one at Innovation Cafe). I practiced market research and business preparations during the TU/e Contest. Lastly, I read books about business and entrepreneurship including Start With Why and Elon Musk.
Future
Based on what I have learned so far, what do I hope to achieve in the future? The last few months have been very reflective for me. Now that I have experienced all the different elements of Industrial Design, I would like to project forward to see what kind of career I see for myself.
Vision for my future
I have come to realize that my two greatest strengths are: observing my environment to come up with systemic solutions and connecting people to work under a shared vision. It are these strengths that I love doing the most and I would like to utilize these strengths in my future career.
I have many ideas for systemic change, but I can’t create that change on my own. That left me wondering about how systemic change can be created. I figured that big change can only happen when a large group of people firmly believe in the vision you convey. When you influence people to see the world differently, only then is change possible. How does one influence people’s beliefs? I’m convinced that this can be done by creating an appealing vision for the future and presenting it to large audiences in a compelling way.