Competence development
Technology & Realisation:
At the start of the bachelor program, technology for me was primarily something to “plug in” to a design: Arduino, some sensors, some code, and a casing. I could make things work at a basic level, but I did not yet understand how interactive systems are structured, how they scale, or how technical architecture shapes what a design can and cannot become.
Through projects such as Connecklace, TwistAssist (AVTR), Solar Team Eindhoven, and ultimately my Final Bachelor Project on gesture-based smart home control, my relationship with technology fundamentally changed. I no longer see technology as a collection of components, but as an architecture of sensing, interpretation, feedback, and actuation.
Today, when I start a new interactive system, my first design decisions are not about form but about:
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What data the system must sense
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how that data should be processed and interpreted
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How intention is extracted
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and how feedback and action are looped back to the user.
In the gesture control project, this meant designing a pipeline that separates hand and body tracking, gesture classification, intent detection, spatial mapping, and system state. Instead of writing one large script that “just works,” I learned to split systems into modular processes that can be tested, replaced, and extended independently. This shift — from ad-hoc coding to structured architecture — now allows me to explore complex interactions without the system collapsing under its own complexity.
Solar Team Eindhoven forced this capability to mature further. Working on Stella Terra, a road-legal solar car, required close collaboration with mechanical, electrical, and software engineers, as well as external manufacturing partners. I had to understand packaging constraints, wiring, sensors, materials, and production realities while maintaining a coherent design vision for the interior. This taught me that realisation is not just about making something technically work, but about integrating constraints, stakeholders, and disciplines into one coherent system.
Where earlier I could only work with electronics I already knew, I now routinely adopt new sensors, libraries, and platforms by reading datasheets, testing small subsystems, and evaluating whether they fit the intended experience. I use prototyping as a technical design method: not to demonstrate a finished idea, but to probe feasibility, reliability, and expressive potential.
A clear example of how TR now shapes my design decisions is TwistAssist. The original concept involved a complex shape-shifting surface. Through prototyping, we realised that achieving the required mechanical resolution and reliability would dramatically increase cost and complexity. Instead of forcing the technology, we reframed the design to focus on interaction meaning rather than mechanical spectacle. This was not a compromise; it was a technically informed design decision.
Today, TR is not something I “add” to design. It is how I explore what is possible, what is meaningful, and what is realistic.
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Creativity & Aesthetics
At the start of the programme, I mainly associated creativity and aesthetics with visual appeal: whether something looked good, was well-styled, or appeared modern. Experiential qualities were sometimes acknowledged, but they were not systematically designed for. A successful design was primarily something that looked desirable or visually coherent.
Over time, this understanding changed fundamentally. I came to see Creativity & Aesthetics not as surface styling but as how a product feels, behaves, and positions itself in human experience. This includes materiality, interaction, emotional response, and how naturally a system fits into everyday life. I became increasingly sensitive to the fact that good design disappears, while bad design draws attention through friction and confusion — a principle often illustrated by Don Norman’s example of doors that afford the wrong action.
This insight reframed how I view screens and interfaces. Touchscreens are powerful, but they compress rich physical interaction into flat, abstract gestures. In many of my projects — before I could clearly articulate it — I was already gravitating toward embodied, physical, and expressive interaction. The AVTR project made this explicit: shape-changing controls and tactile feedback were not just aesthetic features, but ways of making technology feel alive and understandable through the body.
The gesture-based smart home system became the clearest expression of this development. Rather than offering another menu or dashboard, it sought to create a magical interaction — where the user thinks about the outcome (light, sound, atmosphere), not the interface. Visual projections, particle systems, and spatial cues were designed not as decoration, but as aesthetic signals that guide and reassure the user, turning interaction into something expressive and intuitive.
Creativity & Aesthetics in my work now means:
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designing interactions that feel natural, expressive, and calm
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using visual language, motion, and feedback to communicate system state
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shaping experiences that feel right before they are understood
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using technology to support emotional and bodily engagement
Rather than making objects look good, I aim to make interaction itself feel good.
Math, Data and Computing:
At the beginning of the bachelor's program, I treated data, mathematics, and computation mainly as tools to make systems function. Calculations, statistics, and signal processing felt detached from design and experience. Over time, this changed fundamentally: data is now one of my primary design materials.
This shift became explicit in my Final Bachelor Project. Gesture control is not driven by buttons or direct commands, but by interpreting continuous streams of sensor data: hand landmarks, joint angles, spatial vectors, and temporal patterns. These signals are inherently noisy, ambiguous, and variable between users. The design challenge is therefore not merely to classify gestures, but to decide how much uncertainty the system should tolerate, when input becomes intent, and how system confidence is translated into action.
Through this, I learned to use data to shape experience. For example, raising the arm had to be recognised with a certain angular tolerance and dwell time: too strict and the system becomes frustrating, too loose and it becomes unreliable. These parameters are not technical details; they directly define how calm, predictable, or chaotic the interaction feels.
Similarly, spatial pointing required interpreting 3D vectors derived from depth data. The quality of selection — whether a lamp feels “easy to grab” or “hard to target” — depends on how these vectors are filtered, stabilised, and mapped to the environment. In this way, mathematical operations such as smoothing, normalisation, and thresholding became part of interaction design.
Earlier in the bachelor, data analytics and programming courses showed me how to process datasets. In later projects, especially Gesture Control and Intelligent Interactive Products, I learned how to turn data into behaviour: how systems infer meaning from signals, and how this meaning shapes what the system does next.
Today, I design interactive systems by asking:
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What signals exist?
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What meaning can be extracted from them?
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How should uncertainty be handled?
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And how does this affect what the user experiences?
MDC is no longer something that supports my designs; it is what allows my designs to be responsive, adaptive, and believable.
Business & Entrepreneurship
At the beginning of the bachelor, I saw business mainly as a downstream activity: if a product was good enough, it should be possible to market and sell it. Over time, and especially through projects such as TwistAssist, Engineering Design, Solar Team Eindhoven, and my Final Bachelor Project, I learned that value, feasibility, and positioning must be designed just as deliberately as interaction and technology.
I now approach projects by explicitly framing:
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who the product is for
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what problem or opportunity it addresses
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how it differs from alternatives
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and whether it can realistically exist in the world
This shift became particularly clear in TwistAssist. The original concept involved a complex shape-shifting surface for rich tactile interaction. While this was attractive from an interaction perspective, technical exploration and cost estimation revealed that such a solution would be expensive, fragile, and difficult to scale. Rather than pushing for the most technically impressive option, the team reframed the concept around a simpler, more robust interaction that could exist as a product. This was not just a technical compromise, but an entrepreneurial design decision: it defined what kind of product this could realistically become.
A similar dynamic played out during Solar Team Eindhoven. Designing the interior of a solar-powered vehicle meant constantly negotiating between experience, performance, manufacturability, regulations, and budget. Choices of materials, components, and construction methods were shaped not only by aesthetics or ergonomics, but also by availability, sponsorship, cost, and production feasibility. This taught me that innovation is not only about what is possible, but about what can be realised within real constraints while still delivering value.
In the gesture control project, Business & Entrepreneurship shaped the entire system architecture. Instead of designing a closed ecosystem, I chose Philips Hue and Spotify as platforms. This positioned the system within an existing market of smart-home users and avoided the need to build a full infrastructure from scratch. The target group — early-adopting households and device managers — was selected because they already invest in smart environments and are willing to adopt new interaction paradigms.
I also consciously avoided positioning the system as a luxury or purely speculative artefact. The use of affordable cameras, commodity computing hardware, and existing devices was a deliberate decision to keep the system within a plausible consumer price range. In this way, cost, scalability, and adoption were part of the design space from the start.
Today, I use Business & Entrepreneurship not to justify designs after the fact, but to shape them from the beginning. I think in terms of value propositions, stakeholders, differentiation, and feasibility alongside interaction and technology. This allows me to develop concepts that are not only engaging and innovative, but also positioned to exist in the real world.
User & Society
In the first year, I often designed from my own perspective. I imagined what I would want as a user and built from there. While this produced interesting ideas, it lacked grounding: I did not yet understand how people’s roles, values, and contexts shape their interaction with technology.
Courses such as User-Centred Design, User Evaluation Methods, and the USE learning line introduced me to personas, storyboards, probes, interviews, and market framing. More importantly, they changed how I think. I now start design by defining who the user is, what they value, what they reject, and how their social and personal context shapes their behaviour.
In the gesture control project, this shift was essential. The system could technically recognise gestures early on, but users did not trust or understand it. Through informal testing and reflection, it became clear that people need to see what the system is perceiving and intending. This led to the addition of projections, particles, and visual feedforward — not as decoration, but as a way of aligning system logic with human understanding.
U&S also changed how I approach ethics and societal impact. Privacy became a central design factor: the system was architected so that camera images could be reduced to abstract landmarks, preventing raw video from being accessible. This decision was not driven by technology alone, but by the understanding that people’s acceptance of such systems depends on trust and perceived control.
I now evaluate designs not only by whether they work, but by whether they are acceptable, desirable, and defensible in a social context. I do this by combining user research, literature, and design probes that allow people to react to tangible artefacts rather than abstract ideas.
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