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Materialising the Intangible
Past
INDUSTRIAL DESIGN - BACHELOR
My professional design journey began in the Bachelor of Industrial Design, where I recognised the effectiveness of tangible, visual, and collaborative sense-making to make the intangible tangible in complex decision-making processes. During my Bachelor’s thesis (iLAND), I applied these methods to support career decision-making, using a reflective toolkit intervention to help students navigate the complexities of their identity in career paths. By tapping into theories like embodied learning, visual sense-making, and the Self-Determination Theory to spark intrinsic motivation, I realised that physical artefacts can serve as powerful anchors for reflection.
From Applying to Adapting
INDUSTRIAL DESIGN - MASTER
The Master’s program marked a shift in my practice: from applying generative and theoretical frameworks to strategically adapting them. I came to see design methods not as rigid moulds, but as flexible scaffolds that must be reshaped to the unique contexts of each project. This required greater contextual sensitivity and moved me beyond following a fixed design “recipe” toward intuitively combining and tweaking methods, depending on the needs of a context.
This shift also helped me move beyond identity labels like “social designer” toward a more self-defined niche: designing reflective interactions. I recognised “designing through translation” as my natural methodology for idea generation, using metaphors and narrative shifts to make abstract or overwhelming contexts more comprehensible. I explored these principles across diverse and sensitive contexts to develop contextual awareness, such as designing for people with dementia and their caregivers to navigate assistive technologies, exploring how playful museum pathways can spark STEM identity reflection for children, and investigating how the physicalization of a student’s professional identity can drive vision-based goal setting. Expanding my design developments from standalone toolkits to integrated service system experiences for reflection, I have broadened perspectives and layers of value propositions.
Competence Development
MY AREAS OF EXPERTISE
I have developed across 5 areas of expertise (user & society, business & entrepreneurship, creativity & aesthetics, technology & realisation, and math data & computing) through diverse projects, seeking specialisation in creativity & aesthetics and user & society. In these projects, development of my professional competencies and exploration of my professional identity and vision have been a gradual process. A visual overview of the development of my personal perspectives on and approaches in the areas of expertise, how they are interconnected in my practices, and how large my ultimate development in each area is in contrast to the others, is illustrated below.
Click to read the reflections for each expertise
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Present
My Design Vision and Identity
WHAT TYPE OF DESIGNER AM I?
Currently, I am a designer of reflective interactions, dedicated to the power of shared, tangible, and visual sense-making. My practice is defined by the ability to externalise internal thinking processes, transforming abstract challenges into physical or visual dialogues that facilitate informed decision-making. I stand at the intersection of Industrial Design and social innovation, ready to apply my expertise in "designing through translation" to create interventions that don't just solve problems, but empower users to reflect and act with clarity.
