I am a pragmatic dreamer, with a slightly stubborn and critical attitude towards injustice and impossibilities. This attitude makes me inquisitive; searching for new information to potentially solve the impossible and/or prove people wrong. Where others often dislike the absence of answers, I often enjoy this in-between of exploring, creating space for my ability to look at things from multiple perspectives. Regardless of limitations, I am able to define different needs, defining opportunities that weren’t recognized before.

Because of my open-minded perspective, I am a strong ideator and conceptualizer, in need of the integration of experiential prototypes within the process. Beyond the conceptualization phase, my inquisitive trait takes over, resulting in me ideating again or switching to a new topic. Therefore, in the past, I have concluded that working with a multidisciplinary team that is able to compensate for my limitations, such as these in-depth parts of a process, has my preference.

I am a highly empathic person, which is valuable to me as a design­er while sympathizing with the user. I often enjoy activities integrating the user, such as interviews or co-design sessions, as I value getting to know my user and their needs. Besides that, this trait is valuable while guiding a team, being able to communicate and feel others’ opinions and needs. Besides being an empathizer, I am a pleaser. It satisfies me to create or increase the value of the user’s daily experiences, based on defined needs.  I  do, however,  recognize the challenge of maintaining a good balance between pleasing and having a strong decision-making designer attitude.

The traits described above are to be summarized in me being a sensing person, taking in a lot of information from my environment. This provides me with a good feeling for details. I like to integrate little hidden meanings or consistency throughout all details. These characteristics make me motivated to always deliver an end product that is in line with the visual language of its context. My personal visual language is strongly influenced by Scandinavian design varying from designers such as Georg Jensen, to mass-production Ikea design.