After completing my VMBO-T, HAVO, and VWO education in high school, I embarked on my journey with a clear goal in mind. I wanted a career that allowed me to work on diverse topics and express my creativity. My broad interests in various subjects fueled my desire to create innovative products or services that could make a significant impact and eventually lead to starting my own company. Industrial design offered the perfect blend of technology, theory, and creativity, which immediately resonated with me. Starting my studies at the TU/e I did not know anything about design nor did I know what to expect. However, it soon became clear to me that this study required me to create my own path and focus on becoming the designer I wanted to be. This led me to set up three core goals that evolved over the years:

1. Finding my professional and vision to communicate who I am as a designer

2. Finding an area of interest to focus on as a designer

3. Learning how to apply design processes and design thinking to communicate my ideas to stakeholders

To define my professional identity and vision, I experimented extensively during my bachelor’s degree. I took various courses and switched squads after each project (Games and Play, Vitality, and Artifice) to become as well-rounded as possible. Despite the diversity of these squads, I noticed a clear common thread in all my projects: a focus on user-centered design and societal impact, particularly in the area of education. The three main bachelor projects: Snackable, PWFN, and A.I.D.T became the foundation of my final vision as a designer who aims to seamlessly enhance human experiences through technology and innovation. Moreover, these projects taught me how to conduct design research, go through design processes and how to use design thinking when doing design projects. From the start, I had a basic idea of my professional identity. To refine this and pinpoint my specific area of interest, I took courses such as Entrepreneurship in Action, Creative Electronics, and Intelligent Interactive Products.

These courses helped me find my niche in human-AI interaction and human-computer interaction. Entrepreneurship in Action provided insights into business design and the entrepreneurial mindset, teaching me how to pitch to stakeholders and present designs after conducting market analysis. Creative Electronics, Intelligent Interactive Products and the PWFN toolkit sparked my interest in technology, particularly large language models and image generation models. These courses taught me the basics of programming with AI and how to incorporate sensors and actuators into working prototypes.

In summary, my design background has evolved towards, user-centricity, education, entrepreneurship and finally user engagement, as evidenced by the final bachelor project A.I.D.T.