Professional Identity
& Vision

01Professional identity

Coming from an industrial design and engineering background, my two years of Master’s studies have fundamentally reshaped my perspective. Today, I am a UX/UI designer driven by a simple belief: design should solve real problems—and not just remove friction, but actively create well-being. I'm comfortable across the full process, from user research and interaction logic to high-fidelity prototypes and technical implementation, and I can build my own ideas with tools like Figma, Unity, and Arduino rather than only handing them off.

Empathy sits at the core of how I work. Whether designing a dance-therapy interface for Parkinson's and dementia patients, an LLM-powered app that helps international students find the confidence to speak, or Urban Feather—a serious game about bird–window collisions—I start by deeply understanding the people I design for, and translate their pain points into solutions that actually fit their lives.

But empathy is only where I start. From there, I translate what I learn into concrete interaction decisions, build them into working prototypes, and test them with real users before refining. I am most engaged when I can carry an idea all the way from research to a system that actually runs and can be evaluated, rather than stopping at a concept. This is the niche I have come to recognize as mine: I am a technically capable designer who stays grounded in users. Technology is my strongest material—and the part of my practice that most sets me apart from designers who stop at the concept stage—but it always serves a human starting point. The constant across my projects is not any single technology, but a sequence: understand the people, build something real, and verify whether it genuinely works for them.

The past two years have critically matured my professional workflow. Studying in the Netherlands and interning in China trained me to communicate across cultures and connect designers, engineers, and product teams around a shared goal. I plan early, set clear milestones, and deliver quality work on time—habits sharpened by four-week design sprints and 48-hour game jams. My FMP also taught me when to redirect a plan: I had set out to build online multiplayer, but once I understood that separating players onto different screens would break the peer co-presence my design depended on, I deliberately dropped that goal. Knowing when to abandon a plan marked a significant milestone in my growth as a disciplined designer.

If there is a signature that marks a design as mine, it is this: I am drawn to learning and behaviour—designs that teach, or that shift what people do—and I insist on verifying whether they actually work rather than assuming they do. This evidence-based instinct extends beyond my design projects into research. I have co-authored five papers at leading HCI venues, including CHI, CSCW, and HCI International, on topics ranging from the usability of game systems to gender and online communities and the ethics of generative AI. Maintaining an active research practice alongside design work is unusual for an industrial design student, and it is part of who I am: someone who treats rigour and real evidence as part of the craft, not a separate academic exercise.

Above all, I stay curious. Throughout this Master’s journey, I have intentionally treated technology as a design material to expand my boundaries. I picked up LLM integration and prompt engineering on one project; laser cutting and 3D modeling on another. On Urban Feather, I used Claude Code as an AI pair-programmer to build the game's systems in Unity—the turn-based state machine, procedural map, and dynamic weather—which let me spend my energy on design decisions rather than getting stuck in implementation. This reflects a definitive evolution in how I work: not coding less, but designing with technology more fluently. In today's multidisciplinary world, I see a designer's real value in connecting processes, disciplines, and people.

02Vision

I believe the goal of design isn't just to remove friction, but to actively create joy, meaning, and well-being. I'm drawn to experiences that feel inherently rewarding—ones that give people a sense of mastery, autonomy, and connection—rather than shallow motivators like points and badges layered on top of a product. I'm critical of "gamification" in that hollow sense; what I care about is designing systems whose rules themselves carry meaning.

As the culmination of my Master's studies, my FMP sharpened this into a clearer thesis: interactive systems can do what passive media cannot—they convert awareness into action. This idea builds on established theory—Bogost's concept of procedural rhetoric, which holds that games make their arguments through rules and processes rather than words (Bogost, 2007). A documentary can make you care; a well-designed interaction can make you do something. This matters most for issues where the solution already exists at the household level but adoption is blocked by the gap between knowing and doing—exactly the gap Urban Feather was built to close. The same approach extends well beyond birds, to other everyday environmental and social behaviours.

I'm especially excited about where emerging technologies meet human experience. AI and XR open up new ways to design interactions that are more natural, immersive, and meaningful—indeed, recent HCI scholarship argues that AI has introduced the first genuinely new interaction paradigm in decades, while noting that its experience and design layer remains underexplored (Weisz et al., 2024). That gap is exactly where I want to contribute. But new capability does not automatically mean real demand, and I want to design for where the two genuinely meet. I see that demand most clearly in education: learners increasingly expect experiences that are interactive and personalised rather than passive, and recent meta-analytic evidence finds that AI-driven approaches can measurably improve engagement and learning outcomes over traditional methods (Zhao et al., 2026). These are not interactions in search of a use—they answer a demand that is already here. My work integrating GPT-4 into a learning tool and building Urban Feather with AI-assisted development are early steps in this direction.

What ties it all together is humanistic care. Looking ahead, I'm returning to China to work as a UX/UI designer, with a particular pull toward education and learning experiences—a thread that runs through nearly all my work, from the language-learning app to a game that teaches without ever feeling like a lesson. I want to design technology that genuinely makes people's lives better, and that meets them where they are.

References
Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. MIT Press.
Weisz, J. D., He, J., Muller, M., Hoefer, G., Miles, R., & Geyer, W. (2024). Design Principles for Generative AI Applications. Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Dong.Y. (2026). Generative AI technologies and educational outcomes: a comprehensive meta-analysis. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

03Relections on Expertise areas

User & Society

User and society has been the most consistent thread across my Master's. My instinct has always been to start from a real human difficulty: in M1.1, SleeveView grew out of the specific bind Dutch cyclists face — needing navigation but being unable to look at a phone while riding — which led to a wearable that delivers directions through touch rather than a screen. In M1.2, Switch & Slide took me into a more vulnerable user group, designing a tangible therapy interface for elderly people with cognitive and physical decline, where empathy tools and close observation mattered far more than any technical feature. By the FMP, my understanding of "users" had widened from individuals to society: Urban Feather addresses not just a personal behaviour but a collective environmental problem, and I evaluated it through a structured comparative user study rather than informal feedback. Over two years I moved from designing for a clear user need to designing for behavioural and social change, and from gathering impressions to measuring whether a design actually shifts what people intend to do.

Creativity & Aesthetics

My growth in this area has been about learning that aesthetics is not decoration but a carrier of meaning. Early on, my creative work was largely physical and tactile — the textile-integrated form of SleeveView, the hands-on prototyping of Switch & Slide. With Urban Feather, aesthetics became inseparable from the argument the design makes: the physical board game was a high-fidelity artefact (laser-cut board, hand-painted 3D-printed bird tokens, illustrated cards), and the digital version carried that visual language into a coherent interface where every element — the fog-of-war, the weather effects, the card illustrations — communicates ecological meaning rather than simply looking pleasant. I came to treat visual and interaction aesthetics as part of how a design persuades, not as a layer applied at the end.

Technology & Realization

This is the area where I grew the most, and most deliberately. At M1.1 my technical work was rooted in physical computing: SleeveView used Arduino and textile-integrated actuation. In M1.2 I moved beyond tangible making into digital and immersive technology, including a VR project that pushed me to work with real-time 3D environments. For the FMP I taught myself to build a complete digital game in Unity with C#. I used Claude Code as an AI pair-programmer, which let me operate at a level of technical ambition I could not have reached alone, while still making every architectural and design decision myself. My relationship with technology evolved from making physical things, through immersive 3D, to building full software systems — and, more importantly, to using AI tools fluently so that implementation no longer limits what I can design.

Math, Data & Computing

My development here runs alongside Technology & Realization but is about reasoning with data rather than building systems. The clearest growth is visible within the Urban Feather project itself: before producing any physical materials for the board game, I wrote a numerical simulation in JavaScript to test whether the game's resource economy was balanced — using computation to validate a design before committing to it. For the FMP, this matured into formal empirical analysis: I designed an A/B study, and analysed the results using inferential statistics (independent-samples t-tests and Cohen's d effect sizes) rather than reporting raw impressions. I also designed the data-driven architecture of the game, separating tile, character, and card data from gameplay logic so that ecological parameters could be adjusted without touching code. I moved from using computation as a private design check to using it as the basis for evidence-based claims about whether a design works.

Business & Entrepreneurship

This is the area I engaged with most lightly. My thinking here is mostly conceptual rather than tested: for the FMP I mapped out the stakeholder landscape for Urban Feather (schools, museums, conservation NGOs such as Birdbrain.nl, and public biodiversity funders), articulated a value proposition for each, and positioned the game against comparable environmental games. I also framed the project's longer-term value as a transferable design framework rather than a single product.