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 much about design and design research 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 Identity and Vision to communicate who I am as a designer

2. Specializing in the expertise areas of Business & Entrepreneurship | Creativity & Aesthetics

3. Starting my own design studio | Studio Dribb

To define my professional identity and vision, I explored a wide range of directions during my bachelor’s degree. By moving across different squads (Games and Play, Vitality, and Artifice), I intentionally developed a broad skill set and perspective on design. Across these projects, a consistent thread emerged: a focus on designing for meaningful user engagement with complex or abstract topics, often within an educational context. Projects such as Snackable, PWFN and especially my Final Bachelor Project within the Artifice squad laid the foundation for this direction, where I focused on making emerging technologies like AI more accessible through experiential and interactive design.

During my master’s, this foundation shifted significantly. Rather than focusing on clarity, usability, or direct educational outcomes, I began to position ambiguity, curiosity and aesthetics as central design materials. Through the development of Studio Dribb and the Ambiguity Driven Design (ADD) methodology, my work evolved from explaining systems to designing artifacts that invite exploration, interpretation and reflection. This shift is also visible in the Artifice client case, where instead of translating theory into clear instructions, I designed an object that allows users to experience and interpret abstract principles through interaction.

This development was strongly shaped by my master courses. In A Designerly Perspective on IoT, I learned the value of rich interaction and how interaction design can move beyond functionality toward experiential depth. Courses such as Creativity and Aesthetics of Data and AI further strengthened my interest in designing with, rather than for, intelligent systems, focusing on how data and AI can be expressed in more aesthetic, engaging and interpretable ways. In parallel, business-oriented courses like Value-Based Leadership in Business Innovation helped me position my work within a broader societal and organizational context, shaping how I frame value, communicate concepts and build a coherent vision around my practice.

In summary, my design development has evolved from a user-centered and educational focus toward a more distinct position: designing for engagement with complexity through ambiguity, aesthetics and interaction. This is grounded in a constructivist perspective, where meaning is not delivered but actively constructed through experience. My Final Bachelor Project established the thematic foundation, while my master’s development transformed this into a clear design approach, methodology and studio vision that I will further validate and operationalize in my Final Master Project.