Design is about creating value for people and positively impacting one’s life. Although I have always naturally empathized with people in general and had an interest in psychology, I have never actively utilized these qualities within design projects prior to starting my studies in Industrial Design. An initial instinct when designing was to reflect on designs and decisions from a personal perspective. However, I soon realized the importance of empathizing with target groups that I cannot fully identify with, enhancing a user-centric design.

​

To effectively design for these groups, empathy became crucial. Courses like User Centered Design taught techniques to understand people and their societal context, as well as valuable data-gathering techniques and the translation of this into user requirements. This toolset and knowledge have been applied in most projects and further developed subsequently. A desire to further enhance my empathizing capabilities led to facilitating hands-on experiences with co-design in Project 2 and 3, and participating in a summer school in The Hague wherein I immersed myself with 24 other young professionals in the geographical context of a design case, closely interacting with stakeholders for an ultimate empathizing experience. This has significantly broadened my horizon and highlighted the significance of participatory design, aligning with my current vision of the value of collaborative sense-making for stimulating a multi-perspective view to serve as a foundation for user-centric design decisions.

​

During my studies, I also developed a strong sense of ethical considerations in design, particularly emphasized in the USE Basics course, where I chose the track of Behaviour Change Technologies. The importance of ethical awareness was further reinforced during semester design projects and my internship, focusing on vulnerable user groups like children, adolescents with chronic illnesses, and young adults with autism and identity questions. In these projects, extensive research was essential before approaching users. In addition to collecting user insights, I also gained proficiency in various methodologies for assessing those such as programming numerical data as well as investigating qualitative insights through affinity diagrams, enabling me to make informed design judgments supported by empirical data. Also, research projects like Project 3 and Making Sense of Sensors have provided me with the knowledge on how to design studies to collect all aforementioned data.