Past Work
Courses and project that influenced me the most throughout
1st year Bachelors - 4th year Bachelors
From Idea to design is the first design project of the ID bachelors at TU/e, it teaches students the process that goes from idea to design. Our team focused on creating a fun game. The game 'Blockout' is a competitive memory game. It was my first design project working in a team. The main concern of the course lies with teaching design skills such as researching, ideation, conceptualization and realization. For me, this project involved learning soft skill such as the capacity to properly ideate and communicate ideas to my team, as well as fostering a collaborative mindset and the will to "kill your darlings."
I also concerned myself with establishing a high standard of visual fidelity and identity of the product. Futher developing video editing, 3D and adobe skills.
⦁ Teamwork involves being able to let go of ideas that you thought held promise for the sake of the exploration and taking honest feedback.
⦁ Being younger and less experiences, I found myself too prideful in my ideas and some sourness came to surface against my team which initially came at the cost of a collaborative atmosphere.
Keeping track of what items you have stored and when they’re expiring is a time consuming and tedious and often forgotten task. This project attempted to solve this problem by creating an intelligent agent that keeps track of everything that’s going in and out of the drawers using object recognition AI. Additionally it suggests meals you can make with food that’s about to expire.
In this project I assumed the role of meeting chairman and often found myself suggesting and taking charge of making pivotal decisions. Determining the target audience, creating suitable personas, and curating high visual fidelity for communicative purposes were amongst my main tasks.
⦁ Communication before, during and after meeting points determine the team synergy and collective understanding of the project moving forward. It needs to be clear for all members at all times.
⦁ Thinking project schedules have to be rigid and non-negotiable. Not yet understanding that taking steps back and ambiguity is a natural part of any given design process.
TRIBLE was a project that addressed a hypothetical problem of 2037: A growing disconnect between families that's driven by the increasing involvement of media and content into our lives. These so called "hyper-individuals" live their life according to themselves and for themselves. How can these hyper-individuals, who are unaccustomed to compromising with others, successfully share a living space? The proposed design solution involved a smart dinner table that would balance the dinner-dynamic of the family through data driven live visualization of speech and post-dinner data driven artwork that is intended to have the family actively reflect on their connectivity during dinner as a domestic practice.
In this project I took a step back from my previously regularly assumed managerial role. It was a learning experience to work in a group of equally enthusiastic, yet wildy varying thinkers. This project saw further development of soft skills such as communication, pitching, and critical feedback incorporation. Moreover, design skills such as ideation, conceptualization, data visualization and (VR) experience design were developed over the course of the project.
Learning Points
⦁ Embracing the ambiguity of the fuzzy front end leads to better idea generation by not allowing weak early concepts to take lead in the design process
⦁ Allowing for steps back in the design process is a vital component to discovering and developing the most suitable solution.
⦁ An equal power dynamic, a critical mindset and constructive feedback within the design team can contribute to active avoidance of the groupthink phenomenon.
Pitfalls
⦁ Not having a chair in most meetings made the meeting goals abstract and meetings long. This was good for idea generation but not for planning on the long term
⦁ We developed a tendency to find solutions before defining the problem. This is a reverse way of thinking and not a proper design process: we had to take some steps back to reconsider.
Link to Report
Link to 360 video dinner experience
Exploratory Sketching that teaches students to explore and communicate ideas through sketching. It involves the learning of perspective and other drawing principles that teach the student to turn ideas into solidified concepts that create a clear picture of features and functions of any given design. This course was the catalyst for my sketching development, with these principles of sketching under my belt I was able to communicate my ideas in a way is not only effective but aesthetic and high fidelity. This skill is one that is still prevalent in almost any work I conduct and has become a great stepping stone in the curation of idea to concept to 3D model/animation.
⦁ Ideas and concepts are communicated way more effectively when using proper perspective and design elements.
Aesthetics are more than just how a product looks, it also concerns itself with how a user perceived said product, which in turn informs how they interact with it. This project explored interaction with a waking experience through unorthodox brainstorming methods: interaction relabeling, extreme character analysis & a physical, tangible moodboard.
The resultant product is BULAJ: a wake up experience that determines your wake up time from the amount of light you've set using BULAJ the night before. This project challenged my conventional perception of design and introduced me to emergence as a concept within design. Apart from the meeting and ideation contributions I edited the video and graphically designed and wrote the pictorial.
⦁ Learning to work with an explorative and emergent design process
⦁ Exploring through making, feeling and interacting
⦁ The explorative nature of this design project made meetings long and arduous. This could've been resolved by meeting with more than the goal of exploration and/or better individual pre-meeting preparation.
A Walk Home is game meant to induce anxiety into the player through immersion. Throughout the game, the player encounters game elements intended to reinforce anxiety as the leading dominant emotion. Its all intended to slowly build up to a concluding dramatic climax. The game was designed as a research tool for psychology students at the Tilburg University to research anxiety. During the project I concerned myself with establishing immersion and user testing to gauge the effectiveness of our proposed design. Moreover, I also made all visual elements and explored a spectrum of experiences through storyboarding and communicative sketches.
⦁ Assumptions in your design process are inherent and trying to unveil them is vital to creating a better product/user fit.
⦁ Making (immersive) games requires starting work in-engine as soon as possible as to create a working and testable experience sooner rather than later.
⦁ Research into specific variables requires an environment that helps to isolate and make measurable those variables. Although realized to an extent, this project could not fully isolate these variables and the resultant experience, though effective, is not necessarily suitable as a research tool.
a USE line is a program consisting of three courses, this USE line concerned itself with teaching the student about entrepreneurship, business models, strategies, corporate intrapreneurship and the bridge from design to market. The final project involved a team of students tasked with creating their own business proposal to be pitched in front of a board of stakeholders and/or investors. The designed product is called Planteraction: an AI-based, emotionally responsive plant pot that responds dynamically to changes in its environment and its needs as a plant. Created for the target audience of connection seeking plant enthusiasts, Planteraction utilizes a cute interface and its community of users to connect people and their plants.
Over the course of this USE line I employed various business canvasses such as the PESTLE analysis, Blue Ocean Model, User Segmentation, Customer Journey maps and personas in order to determine the product/user and product/market fit. Moreover, the concept, pot's visual style and company branding were birthed from my brainstorms and sketches. The resultant project was a high fidelity prototype that (after mass production stockpiling) is equipped with a scalable business model and a solid foundation for going to market.
Learning Points
⦁ Increasing my understanding of intrapreneurial ventures, company culture, leadership (styles), business models, pivots, brand equity, design thinking as well as corporate entrepreneurship in general
⦁ There is a big difference in companies that use design and companies that are run with a design attitude at their core.
Pitfalls
⦁ The design attitude requires a careful balance between inviting ambiguity and setting clear goals. The process of design thinking in development can tend to focus too much on innovation and not enough on applying that innovation to realization.
Exploratory making is a course that teaches the student to use various materials and prototyping techniques as means to explore designs, interfaces and interaction. The course emphasized emergence as means to iterate on and draw insights from (previous) designs. Throughout this course I learned to work with foamcore as a main material; creating visually clean yet surprisingly functioning and tangible prototypes through precise cutting, gluing and measuring.
These prototypes may be employed for explorative purposes as well as an accessible means to user test interaction methods or product affordances.
⦁ Further refinement of the explorative and emergent design process
⦁ Handiwork and refinement of micro measurements and glue techniques to keep the aesthetic clean and avoid messiness.
⦁ Emergence is not always applicable but keeping an open mind and active reflection throughout designing may foster opportunities unseen before.
⦁ The inherent unpredictable nature of prototyping emergent from precise measurements, material constraints or even just the unseen steps of turning a concept into a physical prototype makes it a time consuming process: start making as soon as possible to discover the physical drawbacks of any given design.
The game development courses were a further deep dive into game design and my affinity for creating experiences. I worked on creating a visual style for both games, as well connecting that visual style to a storyline: think posters, game environment curation and character creation; it all plays into how the player perceives the world. These courses taught theory on how games are made to be fun, motivating and engaging for the player.
Though mainly for fun these courses still saw the challenges of learning software, creating assets and style, managing the team roles, learning theory and ideating and realizing in-game systems, mechanics and other unique elements. The main challenge was creating a functional game slice that communicates a proof of concept and allows for functional gameplay, which always came down to some difficult balancing of the elements mentioned previously. In an unexpected twist, developing games requires a degree of system's thinking: establishing a narrative, combining gameplay features and character + environmental design requires a holistic approach that considers how these elements interconnect to provide the player with a sense of cohesion and immersion in the game environment.
⦁ Making games requires an interconnected understanding of how seemingly separate elements work together to create a unified game experience/environment that allow players to enter and remain in the 'magic circle.'
⦁ Making games is challenging and requires clear and specific communication regarding team roles to build collectively and not against each other.
⦁ Technical limitations are regular and having an agile approach to planning can be fruitful for game development.
⦁ Placing too much emphasis on Creativity & Aesthetics leads to the faux belief that customized assets are required for (most) everything. Whereas utilizing the community's free resources may lead to a quicker and cleaner development cycle that has more space for user testing and an iterative workflow.
HTML Website Maker