Bachelor Year 1

Lucid dreaming is a complicated and abstract concept. Yet, many people have experienced some kind of lucid dreaming in their lives. It means that you’re aware of the fact that you’re dreaming, while you’re asleep. Besides controlling your dream, lucid dreaming offers the opportunity to practice skills that you can apply in daily life.
With Somnia, my team members and I created a toolkit to trigger and train lucid dreaming. It consisted of an orb to save your dreams in, and a reality-check bracelet.

This first design project was mainly useful for practicing collaboration skills, iterations and getting familiar with user testing and prototyping. Our group didn’t agree on the approach and interpretation of the project, which required lots of compromising. We made it work by dividing tasks and focusing on more individual goals in the project.

The three modules of my USE Learning Line, highlighted the business aspect of design. In New Product Marketing, I learned about consumer behaviour and market analyses. I performed both qualitative and quantitative research during the course

Marketing Research and Design Methods, which were used to set up a marketing approach. To process quantitative data, we used SPSS. The last module, Innovating By Design, offered the opportunity to work with a client – in this case, the fire brigade.

My group and I identified design opportunities for a transportation system, by benchmarking and performing qualitative research, came up with designs and validated them with the client. We completed this course with a 9 and I was asked as a tutor for the year after.

I had no prior knowledge of programming and coding, when I started the Industrial Design bachelor. In this course, I learned the basics of Processing and Arduino, in order to create a circuit with a simple interaction. It laid the foundation of my technical skills as a designer. Especially linking the Arduino to Processing

and have those communicate, was a challenge for me, and I used this in almost every project after that involved technology. My skills further developed in Creative Electronics, Intelligent Interactive Products and my B2.1 project.