Bachelor Year 3

My internship at OWOW, an innovation studio/design agency in the centre of Eindhoven, was a valuable experience for me, both as a designer and as a person. It really pushed me to be more productive and confident in my work. My internship was highly business-focused. The main tasks I had, were regarding growth hacking, communication and managing. I did the social media for multiple clients, reasonably contributed to the entire communication of organising a big event

and, later on, started working as a Product Owner for app development. Many of these tasks involved graphic or UX/UI design, of which I picked up skills along the way. Furthermore, I developed in taking a professional attitude towards clients and other stakeholders, in meetings as well as communicating through email or phone. I learned how to adjust to their way of communicating and operating, while keeping my own identity. Working in a company as a design professional, put my studies in a different

perspective, too. I re-appreciated the opportunity to learn (and sometimes fail, too) as a student, when the consequences of your mistakes are usually not as big as when you’re running a business. Before I did this internship, I was heading into the direction of business and marketing with my future plans. Although I very much enjoyed working at OWOW, I also found out that both the strong focus on marketing and having a leading/directing role in a team, are not what I’m aiming for at the moment.

As a child, I was always drawing, painting and crafting. Growing up, I took less time to express my creativity that way and I missed it. Exploratory Sketching seemed like a great opportunity to pick up skills and get back at it again. I was soon to find out that this way of sketching has a completely different – way more technical – approach than the drawings and doodles I used to create. I learned about

perspectives, techniques and little tricks to make the sketches look more realistic. More importantly, the elective provided a set of skills to quickly draw a shape or design that was in my head; to communicate these ideas. In addition, it put emphasis on the way that objects are constructed, which is of added value when building an object yourself.

The course “Intelligent Interactive Products”, was an opportunity to challenge my programming and computing skills. As I collaborated with people that had more experience and skills in the field of technology, I was able to learn a lot from both the course and my teammates. In this elective, I learned about data acquisition and machine learning algorithms, in order

to create an intelligent interactive product. With my group, I first created an intelligent system for saving energy in a home environment. For the final assignment, we developed a handwriting correction tool for children, using the Neural Network (Zhou, 2019) as an algorithm to train the system. I learned about dealing with data and

programming soft- and hardware, on a higher level and with more complexsystems, than in the projects I had done before. Although my vision and future plans had never been technology-focused, I really enjoyed this elective and it contributed greatly to my overall set of skills as a designer.

References: Zhou, V. (2019). Machine Learning for Beginners: An Introduction to Neural Networks. Retrieved from: https://victorzhou.com/blog/intro-to-neural-networks/