My first contact with user focused design work started in my student time. I became part of the student music association ESMG Quadrivium . As someone with experience in Adobe programs, I developed my promotional skills there by founding their House Style and making the majority of their concert – and member recruitment designs. Later on, this also became my job as a part of the EWUU and promotional team at Innovation Space, promoting the Challenge Based Learning at the TU/e. These experiences contributed towards my design practice in two main ways:

- I discovered that finding the things to promote that are close to my values truly contributed towards motivating me to develop. This has also been a big part of inspiration towards the creation of my FBP UpSquare.it
- Because of the work experience, I had plenty of knowledge in Video editing, Adobe software use and knowledge about what is needed in aesthetic design.

This project aimed improvement in the collaborative environment. MEEBA (Meeting Balance) is a modular device positioned on a meeting table, composed of a central station and individual elements (Meebits). MEEBA is able to recognize participation, and reacts with light to give all participants a chance to have their say. I developed my Technology and Realisation expertise by making the working central device, as well scannable NFC chips in the Meebits. Find everything about the project here:

Main takeaways:

- I grew in my teamwork skills, being critical and allowing myself to make decisions early on, keeping in mind that you can always go back. However nice the group balance is, you still have to think through the planning and task division in time.
- A new interest into users research was found. Throughout the project, I learned to work with users with their needs in mind. The design needed to reflect what we discovered throughout the user research, and was eventually made to match.
- At this stage, my technological prototyping skills were good enough to build a fully functioning device. This drove me to also achieve this in later projects as well.

Using a research through design principle, this project focused on user attachment to their possessions. It was a data driven project, where consciousness and connectedness were visualized in order to better understand the nature of why people decide to behave very careful or thoughtlessly careless with their garments.

Main takeaways:

- I discovered I sometimes grew impatience while working with a team that had skills in other expertise areas as I did. Taking the lead in all technology driven parts, we had to discuss feasibility and share our knowledge in order to continue on the road we wanted to pave. Eventually, this taught us to learn about speaking up and finding a balance with the people you work with.
- I learnt that visualisation tools can be powerful to help convey messages better and that it can be fruitful to develop them during the process for internal review as well.

Besides design, I enjoyed software so much that I decided to pick up a double bachelor's degree in computer science. Although there is much focus on back-end development, I tend to work with my vision as a designer where possible.

An example is where we had to develop a robot for the CBL course Embedded Systems, and I had the most wonderful teamwork which resulted in a well-collaborating team and a functional prototype. Computer Science group projects are very different than those in the faculty of ID, also because the majority of the study is individual. For this project, the course demanded every group to have Scrum Master, a task I took upon me. The previously learned skills in teamwork definitely made a positive difference, which was also reflected at the end of the course.

My promotional interests in the music association grew into an interest to become more involved. In my 3rd year, I therefor decided to become part of the 59th board of the association as Chairman. Working with a wonderful team for a year, it established my teamwork, planning, public speaking and executive work in new directions, which will definitely contribute in future groupwork.