Professional Identity
My caring personality often leads me to societal challenges as a designer, such as improving wellbeing and sustainability in everyday life with behaviour change products. I feel great responsibility to alleviate these challenges with creative and clever solutions. In doing so, I value the insights offered by designing with users and incorporating them in the process through user interviews and tests.
My sensitivity to people's needs is also reflected in my role in a team. It allows me to adapt to what the team requires. By taking on various roles, I have discovered what suits my strengths: generating ideas and suggesting solutions through sketching and prototyping, refining the aesthetics of a design, and visual communication and storytelling. In teamwork, I find it challenging to set my perfectionism aside, however, I have improved in delegating tasks. Additionally, I lack proficiency in technical and electrical realization, but these have seen great improvements recently. In future learning, this is an important area for improvement as machine learning and AI can personalize products to aid behaviour change.
I realize my interest and curiosity in psychology and behaviour have given direction to my focus areas as a designer and my design activities, combining literature with user insights. This aligns with my aim to understand why and how behaviour arises, which makes it possible to change the behaviour with a designed intervention.
All in all, I am a designer who approaches challenges with empathy and understanding and focuses on creating solutions through aesthetics and behavioural insights that foster a meaningful impact on people and the planet.
Vision
I envision design as an impactful catalyst of change towards a future where both people and the planet can thrive together.
I was always taught to repair broken things before discarding and replacing them. This was normal for me, but in reality, most people are much more wasteful and consume more because of it. With this realisation, I knew I wanted to design artefacts that could aid people in adopting sustainable behaviours to reduce consumerism, such as repairing items, which was the norm decades ago. This is a big societal change to accomplish, so in parallel to this aim, we can start by creating more sustainably designed and manufactured products. I approach this from a circularity perspective with emphasis on modularity, which allows easy repairs to products and better recycling.
Another approach is emotional durable design, which aims to increase a product’s lifespan by creating an emotional attachment to the user, aligning with my interests in psychology. I believe this more sustainable future benefits from incorporating storytelling in design, as stories are compelling to everyone, for example, through narrative data visualisations. This method could also be a strong tool in designing behaviour change for well-being and vitality.
Modern society faces challenges in health, such as the prevalence of non-communicable diseases [1]. I realised many people lack knowledge about what a healthy lifestyle entails and what the negative effects of unhealthy behaviours are, as they usually develop later. Ultimately, it became my mission to design ways to make health easy, fun, and accessible in everyday life, adopting a behaviour change strategy.
Overall, my vision taps into behavioural principles, such as habit formation, emotional durability, and narrative psychology, to create designs that last longer and positively influence the way people live.
[1] Noncommunicable diseases: 2025. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/noncommunicable-diseases.
View my Personal Development Plan from my FBP semester here: