Jeroen, you have experienced a complete design process and communicated this on various professional levels. You are a motivated and eager student, with the right set of skills and an analytic approach.
Throughout my Bachelor, I developed the competency areas in a balanced way. I developed a vision which is mostly aimed at interaction design.
Jeroen, your design process has a concrete level and you need to work on your reflective skills on a holistic level. You showed you are in control of your learning activities and reflect on these.
The reflective part of my process needs to have more of a holistic overview, with respect to my goals, but also to link all the learning points into a coherent story, which will allow for easier planning and a better focus for my vision.
Communication: We had regular meetings to discuss progress and plans. Good communication with stakeholders, but I would recommend you to initiate conversations with fellow students, with coaches and other people who may provide inspiration: Get out of your comfort zone.
From my B3.1 on, I have had an interest in interaction design. This mostly related to my skills in web design, as designing visual interaction is something that I like to do. The interest in the automotive sector faded a little, due to the activities in my own web design business, which drives my enthusiasm more than the automotive industry. In addition, the project of this semester sparked my interest for service design. The module Designing for Peripheral Interaction sparked my interest in peripheral interaction design.
Where interaction design is aimed completely at the interaction with individual objects, service design is aimed at the journey that a customer walks through when using the service. From an interaction design perspective, I would design the interactions in sequence. But I’d like to integrate a service design skillset, so I can take the design process beyond the interaction sequence, taking the stakeholders and the overall experience into account.
But another interesting field that I can relate to this, is peripheral interaction design. It aims at enabling users to divide the attention across various objects and stimuli, sometimes making the interaction ubiquitous. In the future, we will have to deal with even more technology, think of having a smart phone, smart watch, intelligent lighting, home automation and always being connected. So from an interaction design perspective, it is quite interesting to design for spreading the attention of a user.
As I experienced during my B31 internship, the R&D of technology companies is catching up on interaction design, but service design is not yet connected to the field of interaction design in these branches. I think I can contribute to this, by introducing service design in these branches. The same goes for my web design business, where I design online services. Up next might be designing the entire journey, taking into account other media and channels to interact with customers (Social Media, print, face-to-face). Each of these need to be in line with the corporate identity, and contribute to a single experience. The channels should be an integrated whole, and this omni-channel setting should represent a single service.
Being quite competent in graphic design and designing for visual interaction, I try to take advantage of these skills in various activities, for example running a web design business as well as being graphic designer at Integrand. Throughout my M1.1, I tried to enrich these skills with physical interactions by taking modules that cover physical interaction design. I also took a step towards service design by means of the project Service 2.0.
Designing the interaction with single objects one at a time, I wanted to extend this further to designing the entire experience, the entire journey. This is where service design comes to play. In a world where everything is connected, service design is the next step for enriching my interaction design skills. It expresses into extending my skill set to becoming a more competent interaction designer, who is aimed at the future.