Personal Development Plan - Pepijn Verburg - M2.2 - v1 - 2016 In this personal development plan I illustrate the goals for the final semester of my Graduation Project. I’ve created an overview by splitting up my development in small and coherent parts. Before I get more into detail, I start off this plan with my identity and vision.
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Identity. Let me begin with the story about my identity, vision and approach on design. I don’t see them as separate stories; they are part of one tale influencing each other all the time. It all starts with my identity. I’m someone who connects the dots. I like to be challenged and I’m eager to find elegant solutions for every question or problem by integrating skills and knowledge from many different fields. I do this with a healthy bit of optimism. In this process I’m a true perfectionist for whom beauty, reliability and consistency have a high priority. I’m someone who likes to analyze, find patterns and define models. I believe this makes the world easier to understand for everyone. I’m fascinated by the fields of industrial design, computer sciences and psychology. Together they are of great value for me as a designer. I unite them by observing and explaining human behavior, finding design opportunities for this and supporting the design process with the power of computing. To achieve this I’m always eager to learn, very curious and devoted to in-depth discussions. I like to alternate between individual work and team work where I’m open to new ideas and fond on inspiring other with mine.
B I have a lot of experience with integrating technology into physical objects where interactivity plays an important role. Also, for almost 8 years I’ve been developing websites, custom frameworks, real-time applications, data visualizations, client-to-server communications for several companies. Within the field of psychology I’m familiar with cognitive and developmental psychology, statistics and a variety of research methods. My ambition is to work on projects closely related to human processes and interactive products that are pushing the boundaries of technology. Vision. My vision is guided by my identity. Our society nowadays values the digital infrastructure and information highly, resulting in a constant effort of translating these intangible entities to things humans can understand. I believe that many products don’t use the enriching, intuitive and beautiful traits of the physical world to its highest potential, creating a bigger gap towards human interpretation. A proper embodiment of this digital world requires a designer. More specifically: a designer who can define the right balance between what to embody and what to keep in the ‘digital black box’.
“Envisioning an embodiment of our digital world”
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Meaningful embodiment of data in prototyping
FMP
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My vision on design focuses on the embodiment of digital infrastructures and information. The current direction of my final master project is strongly influenced by this. Over the past years I’ve noticed a poor embodiment of our digital world during the development of interactive products and systems. With our increasingly complex prototypes this is becoming more and more important.
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Context. However, the present Maker Spaces focus primarily on machinery for material processing; not the process when all the components are put together. My goal is to let people truly understand what your combination of parts is actually doing on the inside and give this an embodiment. Bret Victor (a well-known UI designer) has made a similar observation and presented promising tools in his talk ‘Seeing Spaces’. I hope to engineer a highly reliable and aesthetically pleasing device, that can extend the standard tooling of Maker Spaces.
Collaborations. During the first semester I have setup a total of five collaborations: (1) Umea Interactive Institute, (2) Umea Institute of Design, (3) MediaLab Amsterdam, (4) E-lab Eindhoven and (5) Wearable Senses Lab Eindhoven. These contexts give me a wide variety of different types of working environments which will make sure the developed products is something representable throughout society.
Approach. The project is split up in three big challenges: (1) development of the physical probe, (2) embodiment of the data and (3) integration in the workflow. There is a set of activities and goals that contribute to each of these challenges.
D Components. As I’ve mentioned in my identity and vision I’m someone who likes to analyze and abstract questions to make them easier to understand. During the first two weeks I used this approach to see what components are of great importance for this project. Potential directions per component are already outlined along the process. These components have changed throughout the different iterations. To the right one can see the current collection of components.
1) Medium. How to present visual information? 2) Translation. How to translate the abstracted data to interpretable information? 3) Beauty. How does beauty influences the perceived translation of question 2? 4) Parameters. What parameters are key for the user to influence seamlessly?
7) Business. What kind of entrepreneurial opportunities arise during the development of the project? 8) Connectivity. What are ways to seamlessly receive data? 9) User evaluation. Who is of great value to include during the design process?
5) Interaction. How does the user interact with the data visualizer? 6) Data Behaviour. What are crucial behaviours of the data when the user interacts with it?
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Parts During this final year I want to prepare myself on my direction after the masters program by acquiring certain attitudes, skills and knowledge.
I divided them into 4 parts: psychology, data, product and system.
psychology
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Present. Psychology is a powerful way of describing and modeling human drives.
Present. Creating cognitive constructs, explaining human processes with theories.
Present. Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Statistics, Research Methods.
Future. I want to see how products can influence behavior instead of only taking them into account.
Future. Apply theories on perception and information interpretation to guide or initiate the design process.
Future. Broadening knowledge in perception and visual interpretation. Means. FMP: workflow + FMP: data
Means. FMP: workflow
Means. FMP: workflow
product
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Present. I see product development as something very distant for an Industrial Designer from the TU/e.
Present. All-round experience throughout the engineering process.
Present. There several main modalities in engineering: software, hardware, production processes and assembly.
Future. I want to change my attitude to be more open for the possibilities.
Future. Learn to collaborate more closely with different experts to complete the full engineering cycle.
Future. Gain in-depth knowledge about engineering processes and their sub-processes.
Means. FMP: probe + Olly
Means. FMP: probe + Olly
Means. FMP: probe + Olly
data
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Present. Data is everywhere around us and is considered to be very valuable.
Present. Data gathering (sensors, data mining, meta-data), translation to product behavior.
Present. Packet management, basics of digital signal processing, neural networks, data storage.
Future. I hope to formulate a clear opinion about data loss.
Future. Explore data analysis and real-time features more into-depth.
Means. FMP: data + Lassie 2.0
Means. FMP: data + Lassie 2.0
Future. Gain knowledge about data filtering, data analysis, real-time technologies Means. FMP: data + Lassie 2.0
system
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Present. A system is defined in detail and is predictable.
Present. Abstraction of concept to a coherent model, setting up technical infrastructure.
Present. Emergent behavior, artificial intelligence, know-how of many different programming languages.
Future. I’m interested to see how data points can have their own behavior in a system to create a seamless visualization.
Future. Integration of data-mining and data analysis
Future. Deepen how to connect multiple complex systems.
Means. FMP: data + FMP: probe + Olly Means. FMP: data + FMP: probe
Means. FMP: data + Lassie 2.0 + Olly 5
Means In the previous chapter several means were specified in how to achieve future goals. This chapter describes each one of them.
FMP: workflow. This components of the FMP is about integration into the workflow of a maker. It unfolds what important moments are in the design / engeineering process. A maker is currently defined with three sub-groups: a designer, an engineer and a tinkerer.
FMP: probe. This is about the development of the physical hardware object able to record data from different kinds of sensors. The development of these probes will take place mainly in the Netherlands (at Industrial Design and MediaLab).
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FMP: data. The data component is about how people understand and interpret the data provided by the sensors connected to the probe. Research in data intepretation is vital for this component and has a bigger focus during this semester in comparison with the workflow and probe. Umea is the location to develop this. C
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Olly. The Module Unaware Objects previous semester resulted in a high-level prototype that got a funding from Design United to be showed on the Dutch Design Week in 2015. An improved version is being made to withstand long-term usage. Future plans are to include the prototypes in a research program of SFU that will require them to be used for over 2 years.
Lassie 2.0. This is a custom administration framework for the Study Association Industrial Design. The framework is based on principles supporting true modularity. Currently the beta version of Lassie 2.0 is implemented at Lucid and Intermate (study association of Innovation Sciences). A process is being setup to maintain this online system accordingly.
Short-paper. My previous project was about data collection with runners. I’ve developed a sensor that allows you to measure respiratory rate with a very cheap piezo transducer. With simple digital signal processing methods even cheap microcontrollers allowed the implementation of this sensor. Several staff members asked me to write a short-paper. The coming year I aim for making this a reality.
Thank you for reading.
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