Reflective Portfolio

Past. Present. Future.

A compact reflection on how I developed from a hands-on technical maker into a human-centered designer who uses technology, research, and prototyping to make complex systems safer, clearer, and worth keeping.

Past Present Future
Identity Human-centered technical designer shaped by repair, durability, prototyping, and responsible interaction.
Vision Advanced technology should remain understandable, maintainable, safe, and negotiable for people.
Direction Physical-digital systems, autonomous technology, accessibility, and sustainable product-service thinking.

Identity & Vision

My identity and vision are driven by the same core belief: technical innovation only becomes good design when people can understand it, trust it, repair it, and keep it useful over time.

Professional Identity

I am a human-centered technical designer who translates technology into understandable, reliable, and durable interactions. My identity started with hands-on curiosity: taking products apart, repairing electronics, building computers, experimenting with drones, programming, and learning microelectronics.

My strongest competence is Technology & Realization. I can move between software, hardware, electronics, 3D modeling, prototyping, and user-facing interaction design. During Industrial Design, I learned that a working prototype is not automatically a good design. A good design must also be understandable, socially acceptable, maintainable, safe, and meaningful in context.

Current strengths

  • Translating technical possibilities into tangible prototypes.
  • Using making, testing, and debugging as reflective design tools.
  • Connecting physical-digital systems with user interaction.

Development needs

  • Make leadership and planning more explicit from the start of larger projects.
  • Strengthen business reasoning and value proposition development.
  • Apply a consistent aesthetic and form language across physical and digital work.

Vision

My vision is that future technology should not become more complex for users simply because it becomes more advanced internally. Autonomous, connected, and AI-driven systems can create value, but they also risk reducing people's understanding, control, and trust.

This vision comes from my frustration with planned obsolescence and cheaply made products that fail earlier than necessary. Older tools taught me that durability is possible when products are designed with care, repair, and long-term use in mind. Sustainability is therefore not only about material choice, but also about whether a product can be maintained, adapted, and understood.

I want to design toward transparency, simplicity, modularity, and meaningful interaction. My goal is not to reject innovation, but to make innovation legible, repairable, and humanly negotiable.

Durability Repairability Safety Transparency Practical usefulness Open-source thinking

Past

My past explains why I value robust technology, repair, and learning by making. It also shows how previous learning goals shifted me from a maker with strong technical intuition toward a designer who deliberately connects technology to people and context.

Childhood curiosity

I grew up wondering how products worked and why they were shaped the way they were. My grandfather, a mechanical engineer who could repair almost anything, set an early standard for me: broken objects were not waste, but opportunities to understand, fix, and improve.

Self-taught making

I reused parts from old radios, computers, and electronics, then learned soldering, 3D modeling, and 3D printing to move from quick fixes toward more permanent solutions. Trial and error taught me perseverance, but it also showed me that making needs reflection if it is going to become design.

Early bachelor growth

PI&V, sketching, CBL projects, games, UI/UX work, programming, electronics, and user studies helped me express what I was doing, not only build it. I learned to design for stakeholders, conduct user studies, and develop an identity and vision instead of relying only on functionality.

B31 direction choice

At the end of Year 2, I chose electives instead of an internship because I wanted to strengthen several expertise areas before my Final Bachelor Project. That choice matched my learning style: I learn by applying knowledge, comparing approaches, building, testing, and reflecting.

B31 Activities

These electives helped me broaden my technical profile into a more complete design profile across Business & Entrepreneurship, User & Society, Creativity & Aesthetics, Math, Data & Computing, and Technology & Realization.

Q1

Digital Craftsmanship

Developed communication, teamwork, material exploration, and awareness of responsible AI use in project and research work.

Q1

Designing with More-Than-Human Worlds

Strengthened User & Society by considering nature, materials, ecosystems, and context as connected stakeholders.

Q2

Introduction to Futures Thinking

Connected concepts to market trends, future scenarios, stakeholder groups, and potential value propositions.

Q3

Designing Connected Experiences

Built on embedded systems, networking, and C programming while shifting from isolated products to connected experiences.

Q3

Playful Interactions

Used interaction logic and user input to make complex systems understandable through simple, legible actions.

Q4

Design for Post-Growth Living

Deepened my sustainability perspective through observation, speculation, alternative lifestyles, and long-term consequences.

Q4

Design Actuated Systems

Improved mechanical realization and interactive physical systems while balancing team goals with individual contribution.

Q4

Intelligent Interactive Products

Applied machine learning and sensor-based interaction to reduce uncertainty between people and smart products.

Present

I now position myself between engineering, interaction design, and responsible innovation. The present state of my development is strongest when the expertise areas are connected rather than treated separately.

Business

Business & Entrepreneurship

I improved branding, market research, stakeholder mapping, product evaluation, proposal writing, and pitching. My next step is to turn technical feasibility into clearer value propositions and business models.

Aesthetics

Creativity & Aesthetics

I refined my personal design language through sketching, ideation, peer feedback, minimalism, and visual consistency. I still need to apply that language more consistently across products, software, games, websites, and physical materials.

Data

Math, Data & Computing

I used MATLAB, mechanical calculations, data-driven debugging, interaction logic, machine learning, and sensor data to analyze patterns, validate assumptions, and improve prototypes.

Technology

Technology & Realization

This remains my strongest area. I can work with microcontrollers, hardware, programming, physical prototyping, electronics, materials, and compact feasible demonstrators that make ideas testable.

Society

User & Society

I learned to center requirements around human and non-human stakeholders through surveys, focus groups, ethical review, consent forms, and contextual research. This helps me prioritize derived requirements over personal assumptions.

The main shift in my bachelor is from making technology work to making technology meaningful, safe, understandable, and situated.

Design Skill

I translate technical possibilities into tangible, testable interactions. My growth area is making emotional, visual, and material quality as deliberate as technical functionality.

Design Process

I moved from intuition and trial-and-error toward research, iteration, validation, and reflective redirection. I still need to make planning and redirection more explicit during projects.

Teamwork

I often take responsibility through technical contribution and problem-solving. My growth area is structured leadership: roles, risks, decisions, and process guidance from the start.

Expertise Areas

Technology & Realization is the anchor, but I now deliberately connect it to user research, business context, aesthetics, data, and societal impact.

Final Bachelor Project

Gesture Control shows my current competence because it combines vision, user-centered research, technical feasibility, interaction design, ethical safety, and future professional direction.

Gesture-Based Interaction for Last-Meter Autonomous Delivery

Designing an interaction loop, not only a recognition model.

The project investigates how an untrained person could communicate with an autonomous delivery drone during the final meters of delivery. This is the moment where map-based navigation is no longer enough: the drone may be near the right place, but still needs local guidance about safety, comfort, obstacles, and the preferred drop-off point.

I reframed the topic from a technical gesture-recognition challenge into a human-drone interaction problem. The outcome is a gesture vocabulary organized by interaction function: entering an encounter, guiding movement, pausing, confirming, rejecting, landing, warning, and safely closing the interaction.

  1. Reframe the challenge from recognition to last-meter interaction.
  2. Collect user-generated gestures through survey, observation, and body-storming.
  3. Code gesture families and evaluate them for intuitiveness, legibility, comfort, safety, and camera-readability.
  4. Validate feasibility with a vision-based demonstrator connected to the UAV platform.
  5. Redirect the concept toward feedback, uncertainty handling, and safe-state behavior.

Expertise Area Connections

Technology & Realization enabled the computer-vision feasibility probe and UAV context. User & Society drove participant involvement, safety, consent, and understandable interaction. Math, Data & Computing appeared in gesture coding, recognition limits, and sensor interpretation. Creativity & Aesthetics shaped a legible vocabulary. Business & Entrepreneurship appeared in the delivery context, stakeholder value, service implications, and future positioning.

Critical Reflection

The project confirmed my vision: advanced autonomous systems need to expose their intent and let users negotiate with them. It also showed a limit in my approach. If I focus too much on technical demonstrability, I risk underdeveloping service, business, and long-term deployment questions. My future learning therefore needs stronger business framing, more structured planning, and deeper stakeholder validation beyond feasibility.

Future

My future direction is broader than drones. I want to design physical-digital systems that make complex technology understandable, reliable, repairable, and meaningful for people.

I want to work between engineering, interaction design, prototyping, and responsible innovation. This can include drones and robotics, but also smart products, repairable electronics, accessibility tools, interactive installations, sustainable product-service systems, AI-supported tools, mobility concepts, and physical-digital interfaces.

My future work should prove that technology can be innovative without becoming disposable and without removing human agency. To do that, I need to keep combining my maker identity with stronger business reasoning, clearer design leadership, richer stakeholder involvement, and more intentional aesthetic quality.

Learning Activity

Strengthen business reasoning

Develop clearer value propositions, create basic business models for physical-digital products, and seek feedback from people with product strategy or entrepreneurship experience.

Learning Activity

Lead with structure

Define project roles earlier, make timelines and requirements visible, communicate risks sooner, and reflect throughout the process instead of only at the end.

Learning Activity

Refine visual and form language

Apply my minimal, practical aesthetic consistently across digital interfaces, physical prototypes, presentations, and portfolio documentation.

Learning Activity

Deepen validation

Conduct more real user research, document ethical considerations, and include social, ecological, and service-level stakeholders earlier in design decisions.

Goal Status

My updated goals show a useful pattern: most portfolio, presentation, branding, networking, prototype, and FBP goals are complete, while visualization and business translation remain active growth areas.

Goal Status Reflection
Professional portfolio, individual projects, brand development, presentations, photography, networking, CBL4 prototype, and FBP delivery. Complete These goals helped me communicate my identity and build evidence outside isolated coursework.
Advanced visualization through Blender, rendering, animation, and texturing. Active This supports Creativity & Aesthetics by helping me present technical concepts with more emotional and visual quality.
Business & Entrepreneurship development beyond academic feasibility. Active This is the key future gap: I need to explain why a concept should exist, who it creates value for, and how it could survive in practice.

Evidence Map

This map makes the reflection traceable: the past explains origin and goals, the present documents competence and gaps, and the future turns those reflections into concrete learning activities.

PI

Professional Identity

Strengths, weaknesses, design skill, process, teamwork, values, and decision-making are connected in the Identity and Present sections.

Vision

Positioning

The vision critiques complexity, planned obsolescence, loss of agency, and unrepairable technology while positioning my work toward durable interaction.

Expertise

Five Areas

The Present and FBP sections describe each expertise area separately and explain how they connect in design decisions.

Reflection

Goals to Growth

The Past, Goal Status, and Future sections connect previous PDP goals to outcomes, gaps, and specific next learning activities.

FBP

Methodology

The FBP section documents framing, methods, evidence, prototype role, redirection, validation, and future implications.