In secondary education, I had a culture and society profile with arts and visual education, where I incorporated sustainability into art projects by using waste, for example. Eventually, I knew I wanted to use my creativity to contribute to society, specifically regarding sustainability and well-being.
With this vision, I started my Industrial Design studies at TU/e. Throughout the years, courses helped develop this vision and me as a designer. For Project 1, I chose the Vital People squad to further explore my interest in well-being, where we focused on nutrition. Originally, I was interested in the topic, but soon realized that, rather than a solution for in the supermarket, I was more interested in applying these topics in the everyday home environment.
This led me to choose the New Futures squad for Project 2, which confirmed my interest in focusing on the home and including it in my vision. Additionally, this project brought forward a storytelling aspect through the episodes and quests, which also became part of my vision to possibly change behaviour for sustainability and vitality. Until that point, it had been difficult to explore sustainability further, but Project 3 in the Games and Play squad did, while it also explored behavioural aspects. This project made my design vision much clearer by incorporating a psychological perspective; designing for sustainable behaviour towards products and behaviour change products for vitality. Moreover, ‘Intelligent Interactive Products’ introduced me to machine learning and incorporating data to personalize assistance, possibly for behaviour change.
To further explore sustainability and psychology, I dedicated my B31 electives to these topics. Through this, I learned approaches and gained knowledge around sustainability and psychological aspects in design. In the course ‘Sustainability & Design’, I explored circularity principles, and this added to my vision on sustainability. In addition to promoting sustainable behaviour, products should also use sustainable resources and production methods.
With this developed vision, I began my Final Bachelor Project.
Art Freedom (Last year of Secondary School - 2020/2021)
