I, and many people with me, believe in liberal humanism, an ideology that commands to protect the inner core and freedom of each individual (Harari, 2011). Because of this, I believe that global behavior change can best be achieved when convincing all individuals to (freely) act in favor of change.
Many individuals following this ideology make choices based on the predicted development of their own wellbeing, relative to their own and others’ current wellbeing. Even though a single individual’s choice may seem insignificant, all these choices have a global effect.
However, this world is one with pressing global issues. We don’t have the luxury to only look at ourselves.
I believe that as designers, we have the responsibility and ability to motivate individuals to make their choices such that it benefits the entire population. For example, by making it more cost effective, efficient, visually attractive, tasty or reliable to choose sustainably. This way, no individual feels their wellbeing is decreasing, but common wealth is increased.
This seems to require innovation. In fact, our world seems to be built on the assumption that we are always innovating: since the introduction of credit, many of our investments have been funded by assumed future profits through the use of loans. The more people started believing in future riches, the wealthier our world as a whole got (Harari, 2011). In the western world, this is combined with capitalism, which argues that a shoemaker generating more profits than he needs to sustain his own family, will employ more assistants, therefore increasing collective wealth (Smith, 1776).
This combination dictates that innovation is necessary for the sustainability of our collective wealth: for everyone to stay exactly as rich as they are now, total profits must keep increasing, as everyone has made a bet on gaining wealth in the future. With a fixed amount of money, it is impossible to make everyone richer, so in order to prevent collapse, we need to increase the amount of money. This money comes from the future: it is the money we intend to make.
While I do not think assuming future progress like this is a sustainable concept, I feel we are at a point where we can no longer go back: we have to keep innovating, increasing our wealth, in order to maintain our current quality of life.
In this innovation, we should aim for design that holds value for both the individual and for the community. Because many individuals, making self-focused choices, can still make profound impact if their choices also bring value to society.
This was a core reason for me constantly considering economic viability of electric trucks compared to diesels in my final bachelor project.
Harari, Y. N. (2011). Sapiens [Print]. Vintage.Since I was about six years old, I have been designing and building things, using materials I found. Around my 12th, I started doing woodworking and at 16, I bought my first (semi) classic car. It was an Audi 100 from 1987, which I liked for its design and interesting 5 cylinder engine. I bought it cheap and there was a lot wrong with it. And I knew nothing about fixing cars, but apparently I thought I could teach myself.
Half a year later I bought another one, with the plan of taking the engine from the first Audi and installing it in the second. After a year of learning, wrenching, gathering tools and most importantly, fixing my own mistakes, it succeeded! A fully restored Audi 100 with a new engine rolled out of my parents’ shed. To this day, I am still driving it.
My habit of just diving into the deep continued: I’m a designer motivated by problems, the bigger and more complex the problem, the more motivated I get. In my past experience, I noticed smaller, “preprocessed” design problems demotivate me and I am not very good at “just doing as I am told”. Instead, I thrive when allowed to tackle a problem or design case with full creative freedom.
Also, I cannot stand repetitiveness: when presented with a repetitive task I almost always find myself designing a system that can do it for me or make it easier. Even if that takes much more time than just doing the boring task.
I’m a quick learner. A past tendency of mine to do everything in a design myself has caused me to learn several hard-skills that prove very useful in cooperation: These include intellectual property strategy, several coding languages, PCB design, aluminium welding and more.
In my internship at Maarten de Bruijn (designer of Spyker and DeBruyncars), he showed me how difficult it can be to unite technical specialists to work on one design: all have very extensive experience in their own field, but share very little knowledge with other specialists, this creates “knowledge islands” which I as designer want to connect. Knowing a bit about every island will hopefully help me to do so.
As discussed in my vision, I believe in liberal humanism, which I incorporate in my designs. To this end, I will always look for ways to bring value to the individual.
I am hands-on and design by building: often, I will start impulsively trying different designs and ideas that pop up in my head, even before researching previous designs and insights about the topic. This seems inefficient (which it is), but it allows me to generate ideas without being “directed” by previous research and designs, this helps me think outside the box, also later in the process.
For more complicated designs, designing by building can be a problem, because my own prototyping skills and facilities can become a weak point. But not being able to build a complex idea with my own hands does not mean it is a bad idea, so this is something I watch out for. In my final bachelor project I solved this by using crude substitutes to get a feel for what the idea would look like.
I developed my aesthetic style with help from Stef van der Bijl (Vanderbyl interior) and Maarten de Bruijn. They helped me shape my aesthetic style with their insights and skills and introduced me to cool materials such as sand blasted pine wood.
Maarten and Stef both cater the high-end market for exclusive designs. I think this is a very interesting market because of the almost endless array of possibilities a low volume-high price per piece market allows in the designs. Inspired by them, I designed and built an interior for an old Volkswagen van in this high end style. In this, I noticed producing one-off designs catered to very specific needs and tastes is not the way I want to go. I see myself more in designing “for everyone”. For most people, cost matters. So I think it should matter in my designs too.