USER & SOCIETY (U&S)
Focusing on societal challenges is fundamental in my identity and vision; I see my role in gaining a deep understanding of societal challenges and their underlying values, to be able to create meaningful impact within them. This is reflected in my development through the consistent engagement with such complex issues and transitions across projects. But more concretely, I acquired new skills and knowledge by exploring a wide range of methods to involve different perspectives and to grow understanding in the design process (interviews, workshops, co-creation, ethnography, contextual research). Doing an internship at Social Enterprise NL in the role of public affairs, I acquired a deep understanding of political context. Across these experiences, I increasingly came to see values as a key driver within my design processes. Through values, I was able to gain insights in what underlies societal transitions, where tensions arise, and how meaningful societal value can be created.
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Past
Throughout my master’s, my development has been closely guided by my professional identity and vision, while at the same time actively shaping them through learning activities and projects. In the following section, I show my understanding of each of the expertise areas, formed by my development in the area and their relation to each other and to my identity and vision. The visualisations that go along with the text contextualise my learning activities and the associated reflections, skills, and learnings.
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CREATIVITY & AESTHETICS (C&A)
Building upon the foundation of U&S for deeply understanding context, I see the role of C&A in creating meaningful impact within societal challenges by using creative methods to engage with their complexity. This can both enrich the understanding, as well as support the development of new interventions to challenge and intervene in the context. To do this, I build upon the broad range of creative techniques I acquired throughout my bachelor’s degree, deepening my expertise by moving into a more niche focus on future-driven approaches, design narratives, metaphoric design, and perspective shifts. Within this, aesthetics play an important role in my work. My personal design style, sense of aesthetics, and attention to quality were strongly influenced by a gap year in fashion design during my bachelor’s, and I further developed by the application of this across a variety of media throughout my master projects as is visible across the visualisations.
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BUSINESS & ENTREPRENEURSHIP (B&E)
Where U&S and C&A form the most fundamental areas of my identity and vision, B&E plays an important complementary role; it adds an economic perspective in understanding how current economic systems can both shape and challenge societal change, and how it can also be leveraged to drive transitions. This perspective informed my choice for the Design Leadership & Entrepreneurship track, where I connect the leveraging of transitions to the implementation of change and transformations in organisations. Reflected in my vision, I see this as a way to bring back individual interventions into the ecosystem.
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To further develop this perspective, I explored a variety of business models and innovation management approaches across different courses. More specifically, in deepening my knowledge on sustainable business models, I focused on the niche of Social Entrepreneurship (SE). I recognize SE as an exemplification of my vision, where social enterprises act as both actors and interventions in transitions, working on societal challenges by leveraging entrepreneurial activity to create social impact, while simultaneously challenging and transforming the economic systems they operate within. This emphasizes why I chose to pursue this focus throughout my learning activities.
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TECHNOLOGY & REALIZATION (T&R)
Within my identity and vision, the area of T&R takes a supporting role; it allows me to bring developed concepts and ideas into the real world by making them tangible through the exploration, creation, visualization, and demonstration of ideas through prototypes. Rather than positioning myself as a technical expert in this, I see myself as a conceptual designer by focusing on the explorative qualities of prototypes. As such, T&R supports the realization, visualisation and tangibility of creative concepts developed to create meaningful impact within complex societal challenges (C&A). My development was therefore guided by a range of different realization techniques. This helped me to understand the possibilities and opportunities of designs, articulate them clearly, and communicate them effectively within interdisciplinary collaborations.
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MATH, DATA & COMPUTING (MD&C)
Similarly to T&R, MD&C also plays a supporting role; it builds upon U&S by offering an important layer of understanding through data analysis and models, when engaging with societal challenges. My development within this area has been primarily focused on qualitative research, in data gathering, analysis and visualisation. I find this type of data particularly relevant when working in the context of societal challenges and transitions, because I believe that quantitative variables cannot always capture the complexities and nuances of this context. At the same time, I recognize that these qualitatively oriented skills are strongly connected to U&S, and that MD&C extends this foundation using statistical methods and analytical models. Focusing on this more specifically, I recognize the value of quantitative data in relation to transition for its ability to ground phenomena and assumptions in evidence and support forecasting.
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​Altogether, my development demonstrates the foundational role of U&S and C&A for my practices as a designer, and how the other areas relate to and support these. Moving across the different expertise areas, Design & Research Processes (D&RP) plays a guiding role by structuring how I navigate between design and research activities throughout my projects. It is not positioned as an expertise area in itself, because it underlies all others, as its processes are inherently present in every project and area. Through my development, I have recognized a strong preference for an open and dynamic approach, allowing me to switch fluidly and iteratively between analytical and creative activities. This way of working supports me in designing in the complexity of transitions, and furthermore supports my aim to move beyond exploration and toward design outcomes that can be positioned as creating meaningful impact.
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