Personal Development
n my PDP I have set as a goal to expand my knowledge, skill and attitude on User Experience design and research, with emphasis on the EA of Technology & Realization. I have set this goal for the reason that I am presenting myself as a User Experience designer and I am opinionated that a UX designer is incomplete when she is not capable of making mid- to high-fidelity prototypes of her designs. It’s not that I have a specific interest in designing for people, sports and vitality, but the aspects of designing for a real-life setting equals a strong focus on User Experience design. Moreover, realizing a working prototype has been set as an official deliverable for this course, which made it fit with the prerequisites of this goal. I was confident that this course would be the means to successfully achieve this goal. Unfortunately, the changed situation and consequences of the pandemic had some influence on the achievability of this goal. Due to the measure of proceeding education through online platforms, it has become extremely hard (actually impossible) to realize mid- to high-fidelity prototypes. I am therefore compelled to admit that this course did not give me the chance to work on expanding my knowledge and skills concerning the AE of Technology & Realization, due to the unavoidable current situation. I could write that this course has given me a huge learning experience on User Experience design, but then I would be lying. I’ve successfully passed a four year Bachelor program on an Applied University on Communication- and Multimedia Design and I will soon be graduating from my Master in Industrial Design, so I can thoughtfully admit that this course has given me no new knowledge and no new skills concerning User Experience design and research.

To refute myself in the statement mentioned above, I did learn that not everything is ‘fixable’ with a questionnaire and that making a questionnaire is not something that you can do in a day. It takes thoughtful considerations and pilot testing to find an approach that will collect the data that you actually need, which is something that we weren’t able to do in this course, due to a time constraint. We ‘quickly’ created a questionnaire without putting too much thought into it (and without pilot testing it), and we were in the sincere understanding that this questionnaire would ‘save’ our project and that valuable data would be flowing in. We were wrong. The realization that the failure of the questionnaire could actually be the aspect on which we would fail this course gave me a harsh reality check on the fact that certain decisions need care, thought and time for them to succeed. I will learn from this experience by taking care, thought and time for certain decisions and considerations in future projects, even when this seems rather impossible due to limited time. Because when the means to get to the result is lacking, the results itself will also be lacking, which leaves you back to the start again.
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Feedback from group members on my performance
(Written by my fellow group members)
You are always very involved with the entire project and always on top of things. You take the lead and make sure everything goes smoothly. Besides, every task you take on, you do complete flawlessly. You are great at report writing and conceptualizing. Furthermore, sometimes you seem to be a bit stressed when multiple tasks need to be done with limited time left which could stress the rest of the team, especially since you take the lead.

Group processes / multidisciplinary teams
In my PDP I have also set as a goal to work in an interdisciplinary team. To be honest, this is a goal that I initially wasn’t planning to set for myself for this semester, but it is a goal that coincidentally ‘came along’ when choosing this course as a means to reach another goal in my PDP.  When I got informed that this course would have me working on a project in an interdisciplinary team, I came to the realization that this is actually something that could be really beneficial and valuable to my development as a designer, specifically because this occurrence also made me realize that I have actually never worked in an interdisciplinary team ever before.
At the start of the semester, I envisioned that this new experience would be very valuable for my development as a professional designer, because working in an interdisciplinary team is something that has a very high chance of becoming a daily reality in my career as an industrial designer, more so than working in a team that only consists of designers.

Even though two out of four members from my project group are also Industrial Design students, the other two members are students from other faculties (Applied Mathematics and Sustainable Innovation). When writing my PDP,  I stated that it could be quite an eye-opener for me to experience what it’s like to work with people that have a different set of skills, a different mindset on how to tackle problems and a different attitude on certain aspects. I set as a goal to give myself the experience of working in an interdisciplinary team and give myself the opportunity to learn about how to be more professional as a designer.

When I am reflecting on this particular goal in my PDP in retrospect after eight weeks of engaging in a collaborative design process with students from other faculties, I can state that I’ve gained some insights regarding the differences between working in a team composed of designers and working in an interdisciplinary team. First, I appeared to be struggling a lot more in communicating my thoughts and ideas to my fellow group members, especially the members that are not designers. Before this experience, I didn’t even realize that I was using a certain terminology in my ways of communicating that might be common language for other designers, but appeared to be non existing in the daily vocabulary of non-designers. In this group, I couldn’t just shout words like ‘persona’ or ‘Arduino’ and ‘Processing’, because a fair share of the group would not know what I was referring to. For this reason, explaining/communicating what I mean with a certain approach, method or idea took up a lot more time than that I am used to. I can say that this experience has helped me to gain the insight that I have developed a field-specific vocabulary and that I need to be aware of this when I am communicating to someone that does not have a (study) career in design.

Moreover, within the faculty of Industrial Design, we are so used to ‘crazy’ ideas, that they are not even deemed crazy anymore. The craziest ideas are most often even the best ideas when they have been made concrete and feasible for realization. It was very new to me that whenever I suggested an idea (that wasn’t even crazy in my opinion), I got an enthusiastic response from my fellow ID students who were drawing further on that idea immediately, while the two group members from other faculties were sitting quietly in a corner, joking about the ’insane’ and ‘wacky’ ideas that were emerging. At some point, the ID students were officially declared ‘crazy’. Even though is was a very new - and very funny - experience for me, it also made me treasure my creativity a bit more. When you are only surrounded by creative people, you tend to quickly forget that it is a valuable skill to be creative and that you are allowed to be proud of it.