From an early age, I have been driven by curiosity and a desire to gain knowledge. This has always fed and still fuels my motivation to help others and possibly improve their lives. Technology, design, and education can help facilitating this.
I find technology intriguing, and as an as ‘early adopter’ I stay updated on emerging technologies, exploring their potential to improve our lives. I aim to become the designer of technologies that do just that.
In my motivation to help others, I communicate my knowledge, extending to educating others about (new) technologies. By successfully following the master Science Education, I boosted my educational communication skills and gained experience in education, which enhanced my interest in educational innovation and highlighted issues I am passionate about addressing through design.
My dual role as a designer and educator defines my unique identity. As designer, I am an innovator who aims to improve lives. As educator, I bringand comprehensibly explain technology, empowering users to make informed decisions about technology adoption and critically evaluating technology in use. Combined, I am a knowledge-driven, goal-oriented educational designer focussed on the learner.
To create educational designs that improve our lives, I empathize with and take input from learners by incorporating them in brainstorm, co-design and user-testing sessions, generating insights and knowledge for further development. I conduct desk research to define the context, supporting initial design ideas, directions and decisions. By combining design principles, such as Learning Experience Design, with educational fields, like cognitive psychology, I aim to develop educational designs that contribute to meaningful learning outcomes, the goal I design for. Being familiar with emerging technologies, I understand feasibility within a design process. While my knowledge-driven approach can lead to seeking extensive validation, I have learned to balance this with decisiveness, embracing the iterative nature of design. Within a team, I often take a leading role, ensuring proper organisation and laying an emphasis on fostering a positive social atmosphere by ensuring all group members are heard, reflecting my people-oriented personality. Within a multidisciplinary team, I embrace my ability to connect various field of expertise throughout a process, fostering collaboration between individuals from different backgrounds, resulting in a comprehensive final design.
Professional Identity
Vision
Every day, every hour, every minute and every second is the future, and as some say: the future is now. Technology continuously shapes this future, through ongoing development.
I envision a future in which technology improves our daily life by seamlessly blending into it, a symbiotic relationship between humans and technology that transforms mundane days into enhanced experiences and fosters positive impact.
This relationship is underpinned by advanced learning algorithms and artificial intelligence that draw insights from both individual and ‘big data’. While developments in this field are occurring at a rapid pace, this relationship is, for many unknowingly, already a reality today, e.g. in wearables, advertising, and recommendation systems.1 The combination of this rapid development and general lack of awareness poses a two-fold problem.
Rapid developments may either cause fear or lead people to use technology without understanding how it works or the implications of its use, including potential (negative) consequences. It (1) hinders people from making informed, conscious decisions about technology adoption and has not allowed doing so for technology already in use, and (2) leads to people, especially youth, to lack a critical attitude towards technology, stemming from their overall lack of digital, media, and algorithmic literacy.2
As designer, I am inclined to address this problem through design that enhances these three literacies, allowing to develop the required awareness, understanding, skills and critical attitude to deal with digital technology. By combining my expertise in design and education, I strive to create educational designs that educate individuals on how digital technologies function, their potential consequences, and how to use them meaningfully. These designs will empower users to make informed decisions about technology, fostering a critical attitude and enabling positive integration into their lives.
To realize this vision, empathizing with the learner, their learning style, the learning environment and learning outcome is key, leading to tailored learning experiences. By embedding educational communication within these designs, I aim to enhance digital, media and algorithmic literacy to encourage thoughtful technology use and adoption, eventually improving daily life in a fast-evolving digital world.
- Nadeem, R. (2023, March 15). What Americans know about everyday uses of artificial intelligence | Pew Research Center. Pew Research Center Science & Society. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/02/15/public-awareness-of-artificial-intelligence-in-everyday-activities/ ↩︎
- Boots, B. C., Matlack, A. K., & Richardson-Gool, T. S. (2024, 1 augustus). A Call for Promoting Algorithmic Literacy. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4912427 ↩︎