Master | Past | Sep ’20 – Jul ’22
Development
PAST
After finishing my bachelor in Industrial Design, my goal was to become a design consultant. This was still quite broad and not yet specified to any field. I also knew and experienced that the skills I had developed during the bachelor were not yet to a level where I could start working in the industry in the field that I wanted at that point. Therefore, I started my master Industrial Design immediately after. During my B3.1 internship, I came across the practice of service design for the first time. Having sparked my interest, I set out to further explore this practice and its potential for consultancy in the master.
I set out to further broaden and develop my skills in the first year of the master, by following a variety of courses and projects that were slightly out of my comfort zone. This way I challenged myself to develop a holistic designer profile before specializing during the final year of my master. Being a part of the ‘New Futures’ squad (then still DIGSIM squad) for my M1.1 project, I experienced conducting a more product-focused design process. Although good for my prototyping and iterating skills, I noticed that the lack of user-led decision making bothered me. The design was not based on a societal challenge, we were not aware of the needs of users and decisions were made based on aesthetics and innovative features instead of qualitative insights.
I wanted to design for more than just aesthetic exteriors, cool innovations or emerging technologies. I wanted to ensure that the whole service and experience behind it was solid. That users would be enabled to use it, had a positive user experience while using it and that it added value to their daily life. I started to see this as my mission and role as a designer.
I took the M1.2 semester as an opportunity to explore this role more. I researched what the role of a designer would be in regards to the development of AI related products and services. This allowed me to reflect on what the role of designers, specifically me as designer could and should be in relation to current trends and innovations.
I decided to go for Research Design & Development. Here I could focus on designing through a user-centered process and applying my various design approaches at a fast pace in the industry context. This focus on creating value for people and directly impacting everyday life was a natural fit with the expertise area ‘User & Society’. My way of working being very visual, a combination of multiple perspectives and with a focus on iterations, ‘Creativity & Aesthetics’ became my second expertise area.
After having focused on broadening my skills during the 1st year of the master, I wanted to apply this knowledge to the field of service and experience design. I knew I wanted to do this in a company context to explore and develop this role I had defined in a true industry context.
During my M1.2 semester, I had met Essense several times and was immediately sold on their way of working and purpose. Luckily the interest was mutual, giving me the opportunity to do my M2.1 project at an expert company regarding service design. During this semester, I was able to submerge myself in service design methodology and specializing in this way of working. The combination of an individual project and assisting with client work prepared me skillswise for my final master project and strengthened my identity as a designer.
Simultaneously, I was looking for a project where I could apply my working knowledge and developed expertise in service and CX design to show my role as a designer. Next to this, I wanted to work on improving the practice of service and CX design methodologically and look how its way of working should be adapted to current trends and innovations. Essense acknowledged this opportunity and offered me to do my final master project there as well.
My final master project presents the collective of what my strengths are as a designer and what I believe my role is as a designer. By focusing on both the development of a service as well as innovating on the way of working as designers, I am able to demonstrate both the role of a designer during product and service development, as well as how to enable others to work in a user-centered way as well. Reflecting on my time at Industrial Design, I now see how the past 6 years, specifically my internships, board year and master, have enabled this project to come together and shaped me as a designer ready to enter the industry.
The Design Research Process provides the basis for all projects. User & Society and Creativity & Aesthetics are my most developed areas. Working in the industry context the past year, I have been able to develop my Business & Entrepreneurship expertise as well. Technology & Realization and Math, Data & Computing provide me with supporting skills to bring my projects to a success. However, I have also experienced that the expertise areas cannot be seen as individual silos. They are intertwined and inform each other when combined in the design process. In this section I will demonstrate how I have developed my different expertises over the master and how they contributed to my designer profile as it is today.
USER & SOCIETY
To me, User & Society is the most important expertise area that exists. Regardless of what you are creating as a designer, one way or another you will be impacting society or everyday life for someone. Through user-centered designing and considering societal impact, you want to ensure that this impact is positive. Through empathizing with the user, conducting interviews and trying to understand the needs and behavior of my target groups, I’ve aimed to ensure a user-centered design process for all projects and courses during the master.
Courses such as designing for behavioral change and user experience theory & practice have enabled me to make this expertise an important part of my identity as a designer and provided me with the tools to engage with the user throughout the entire design process.
CREATIVITY & AESTHETICS
The expertise of Creativity and Aesthetics largely shapes my way of working as a designer. It helps me to look at challenges from different perspectives, gives me the handles to tackle complex issues and creatively shape a design process that suits me, the stakeholders and the challenge itself. Constantly dealing with a lack of information as designer, I use my creativity to generate new ideas, prioritize these and embody them. While my priority does not lie with the design of physical objects and their aesthetics, I do believe that a strong experience and sense of professionalism can be achieved through consistent branding, identity and style elements. This is something that I have always valued and incorporated into my work. Courses allowed me to explore the application of aesthetics to different contexts and what methods were needed in each scenario. These skills show through in my projects.
BUSINESS & ENTREPRENEURSHIP
With the shift towards an experience economy, I feel like our role as a designer has become increasingly important in the industry. As I address in my vision, I feel like value propositions should not (only) be based on possession and revenue, but on long-term relationships and inherent value. Working closely with the industry perspective for the past year, I have experienced that it can be challenging to put research and its outcomes into practice in the industry. Therefore, one of my focuses has been generating knowledge and collaborating with many stakeholders to ensure my designs would be valuable in practice and not only on paper. Through the concept of experiment design, I have also learned how to measure and validate the impact of designs in different contexts, to ensure a design brings actual value to the industry before investing.
MATH, DATA & COMPUTING
Data has become indispensable in our current (digital) society. However, gathering, analyzing and interpreting this data correctly to be of value in design is challenging. As service designer, I often deal with large sets of qualitative data, either derived from interviews, co-creation or validation sessions. My role in this is to tackle this complex and chaotic collection of data and analyze and structure it to produce valuable insights. I look for patterns, underlying clusters and needs, and support the insights with quantitative data where possible and valuable. This data then serves as input and objective factor during the design process and design decisions. Through courses such as data-enabled design and designing user interfaces with emerging technologies, I have been able to further develop my data analysis and collection skills to implement in my projects.
TECHNOLOGY & REALIZATION
When designing, I see technology and prototyping as a means to explore, visualize, experiment and demonstrate new concepts and experiences. Similarly within my niche of service design, technology is rarely the end-solution, but rather a means. With the increase of technological developments and innovation, especially in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, I do feel it is important that we as designers are aware how these technologies come to be and can be adopted in the design process. Therefore it is important to understand its basic elements, functionalities and how engineers from different disciplines communicate regarding these technologies. I am familiar with available technologies for design and am able to use these to such an extent that I can communicate my ideas and design decisions to stakeholders involved.
DESIGN RESEARCH PROCESSES
Throughout the design process, research supports me in guiding, exploring and validating design decisions through each iteration. Doing this not only ensures all decisions are grounded and as objective as possible, but also helps in presenting, leading and taking responsibility over the design process towards others. This expertise has and alway will provide me with a solid base and in the future I will aim to keep combining design with research to ground my work.
PROFESSIONAL SKILLS
The past 6 years at Industrial Design, I have participated in several extracurricular activities to develop myself on a professional level as well through soft skills. My board year at s.v.i.d. Lucid, specifically my role as secretary has taught me how to target communication to different audiences, how to collaborate efficiently within teams and dealing with conflicts and crises. Taking on several student assistant jobs, working at the communication department of ID and being a member of the program committee collectively contributed to me now being able to work and thrive in professional settings and being enthusiastic about working in consultancy.
MEMBER PROGRAM COMMITTEE
STUDENT ASSISTENT ID COMMUNICATION
STUDENT ASSISTANT PI&V
STUDENT ASSISTANT UXTP
FREELANCE INFORMATION DESIGN
CURRICULUM
This visual presents how I designed my master curriculum. All courses have been carefully chosen and placed to contribute to the development of the designer I am today.
The courses followed in the second year of the master are both courses of the department of Innovation Management. I felt like these were a better fit with the field of service design and competencies I still wanted to develop than the remaining courses that were offered at ID.