When starting this Bachelor’s program, I expected Industrial Design to be an applied-arts adjacent discipline that utilized new technological advancements to create attractive redesigns of common products, many of the past design icons being furniture or utensils.

Then I was introduced to the five key aspects that make up contemporary design, the expertise areas, and spent the first year exploring what goes into making a product or service innovative. This text will recount my work after this introductory period to outline my development as designer, eventually ending up with a focus on material research.

           

The used examples will be in the form of explicit projects instead of course titles, and I will exclusively describe my personal roles within these projects to only showcase my personal skillset.

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Extracurricular Activities

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I define Extracurricular Activities as any efforts I pursued that do not fall within the direct expectations of a course.

Like how expert interviews do not fall in this category as while they are not organized by the university, they are expected of the students; yet during my last two projects I’ve taken this one step further by finding external collaboration that spans across the whole process, both doing an internship at the TextielMuseum and collaborating with New Order of Fashion to create works that are going to be exhibited at both these respective places.

 

Furthermore, I have taken up a role as Teacher Assistant three times to -after completing these courses myself- use my gained expertise in assisting others and familiarizing myself with the demands of such an executive role; especially during long-term sickness of the leading professor. In this USE learning line I guided student teams through the complete steps of launching a business; from first ideation to creating a marketing campaign.

 

Lastly, a hobby got involved with this educational system as I gave a workshop -per request of Lucid IDcate- on goldsmithing to 20 students, both improving my own physical making skills and presentation abilities to create an understandable tutorial.

 

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Creativity & Aesthetics

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For me, this expertise area used to mean just the act of making products look attractive and thus desirable; yet I was always balancing doing either too much and creating an overwhelming experience, or too little and ending up with something boring.

This was until I realized that creating an intuitive product relied on blending its form and function, resulting in an artifact that expressed its utility visually. I’ve implemented this principle in projects such as a modular garment where aesthetics both served to showcase the core concept of adaptability, but also to persuade users to adopt a novel concept they otherwise maybe wouldn’t be receptive to.

 

This influence of beauty on desirability and intuitiveness was explored even further in a project revolving around creating a sense of seductiveness through materials, and a collection of metal woven samples; as these strictly material-based demonstrators had to express agency even while lacking the specific use-case of a full-fledged product, showcasing the relation between materiality and perceived functionality.

 

I’ve learned that graphic design such as reports or posters benefits from added visual impact when it’s inspired by the project itself, as a color-scheme or layout that matches a product makes it that much more relevant and calming to look at.

However, I tend to deplete all my energy in a project just before the deadlines, often resulting in the visual design of complementary files falling short of optimum competency.

 

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Technology & Realization

 

At the start of this education I had the understanding that ‘technology’ equaled ‘electronics’; and thus many early projects revolved around using Arduino circuitry, motors and sensors like gyroscopes and potentiometers to introduce functionality into my prototypes.

I then realized that technology had a much broader meaning, namely everything a person has consciously invented to aid a specific task. I was able to truly situate this definition into my personal way of working when I learned of a discipline in design that is based around manipulating the way we interact with a product, Aesthetics of Interaction; as this meant that the materials used in an object can also be seen as a technology.

 

Many later projects revolved around utilizing materials and the way they connect to each other in innovative way to create functionality; without the use of electronics in the final product, but utilizing a combination of old artisanal techniques combined with novel digital manufacturing such as 3d-printing, laser-cutting, embroidery and Jacquard-weaving.

           

One project introduced the concept of modularity in design to create adaptable and repairable products, I realized it’s potential for increasing the longevity of an object, and explored this further through a perspective of circularity, cementing the belief that modularity design presents a category of technologies that has an essential place within my mental toolbox.

 

Before this education program I already possessed physical experience with materials such as wood as metal, and expanded on that within the curriculum to gain expertise in fields such as plastics and textiles. Yet as sustainability becomes a fundamental value to my practice, I have to assess the unique agency of  materials and their environmental consequences; Silicone is for example a very enjoyable material to use, but will likely not have a niche in my further career due to its limited recyclability.

 

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Business & Entreperneurship

 

Understanding how to situate yourself in the relevant market and being able to connect with others both through team-building and network-expansion is crucial as a professional.

Some aforementioned extracurricular collaborations were especially helpful in this topic as gave me a frame of reference to real-world job descriptions, realistic workloads and various team dynamics.

 

However, I also learned within the courses themselves what factors the industry comprises of. First of all I became acquainted with many distinct perspectives and work styles through a multitude of interdisciplinary group projects; and contemplated factors that affected market viability such as product positioning, a bill of materials and models such as business canvasses and stakeholder maps, all to construct a market launch plan.

This was then placed in an even more life-like scenario through a case study on the current an potential business endeavours of IKEA, and adding an extra level of specificity and robustness to our findings and suggestions through PESTEL Frameworks, product journeys and Future Cones.

 

 

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User & Society

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This was the first expertise area of which the purpose was completely clear. Understanding the entities that will be using your product, and the societal framework in which you are designing it helps to give a project direction and shape it in such a way that it will have genuine impact in people’s lives.

 

Often just running questionnaires, interviewing the general target audience, creating a user segmentation and multiple personas can be sufficient to collect opinions and validate ideas; yet sometimes approaching professionals within the field yields more detailed and reliable information.

I have also done projects where I physically worked on the concept itself with the public through co-creation sessions, which allowed me as designer to break free from my inherent biases and truly achieve iterations from different perspectives.

 

But as this university is based in the Netherlands, many of the insights you would either collect yourself or through participants are still somewhat situated in Dutch culture; this presents an issue when designing a product for another part of the world or a service that would be globally accessible.

This is why some projects revolved around this exact issue, and made use of expats and the Cultural Dimensions of Hofstede to establish an understanding of a culture, allowing people that weren’t part of it to still make informed decisions on what a product should take into account with regards to color, iconography and use-case, and how it would be received by locals.

 

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Math, Data & Computing

 

Much like with Technology & Realization, I remained stuck on the idea that the collecting and processing of data is exclusively something that had to do with the digital realm for far a long time, until I realized how in past projects any coding often involved a translation from these digital factors into physical ones, or vice versa; like how a digital number inputted into the Arduino program coupled with a motor or LED became a physical sensory experience, or how sensors could read real-world occurrences and generate digital datasets to allow for further examination.

As such, there was clear opportunity for data analysis to support how material properties were implemented in products, and I explored this by recording over 500 datapoints of the reaction between felt and various scenarios such as a constant pulling force acting upon it; to then use this data and compute visualizations with which I could ascertain the physical attributes of these material and technique combinations.

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I also got my first experience regarding Digital Twins, where I used Blender to model a physical artifact and experimented with digitally manipulating it’s perceived material qualities; this presented interesting opportunities for initial concept iteration without using physical resources, especially as multiple material-specific modeling programs such as CLO3D already are in widespread use.