A selection of my work

Ranging from 2012 till 2025. Some personal projects and some from selected clients.

Developing new interactions with and for Amazon Alexa

Amazon | 2019-2021 | Team/UX Lead for Concept, Product, Voice and Light Experience

  • Amazon constantly looks for new innovations, but finding true value can be challenging. We helped them in translating ambiguous ideas into shareable experiences, aiding internal decision-making processes on where and how to develop value.

  • As a team lead I’ve done several projects with the innovation team Lab126 within Amazon. Amazon's fast-paced environment required swift project turnarounds, placing additional pressure on our internal processes. As a team leader, this called for rapid decision-making and effective storytelling to be able to present a great end product. The success of our first project led to a second project and a nice dinner with a satisfied client.

    • A small, focused team that doesn't waste time on unnecessary meetings can compete effectively with a larger client team. This is one of the valuable aspects of consulting. At that moment this was an important insight for me as a novice team lead.

    • We managed to make the interactions much livelier in comparison to their current product, while using the same materials. This enhanced the user experience without increasing the cost, which was crucial because this device was one of their best selling products. We did this by doing lots of low-fi experiments to find creative ways to control light within a limited amount of space.

    • While voice interaction offers flexibility, it can pose challenges. Unlike typical human conversations, the absence or unfamiliarity of non-verbal cues can impact usability significantly. Mitigating that using other modes of interaction was interesting.

Envision the future shaving experience

Philips | 2021 | Team/UX Lead for App, Product, Voice and Light Experience

  • Philips asked us to envision how an existing product range could be improved. They had some ideas to start with but asked us to translate them into prototypes that could be experienced. The Philips team also wanted to conduct research and user tests with the prototypes, requiring a high level of reliability and repeatability.

  • Taking on Philips as a new client posed a unique challenge for me as a team lead at Handmade. Our aim was to slightly exceed expectations to make a strong impression on the client, while also ensuring the team could meet deadlines without too much stress and overtime. This resulted in fruitful discussions about the level of fidelity we needed to achieve. In the end, we reached a good compromise where the team took pride in the deliverable, the client was genuinely impressed by the high quality, and Handmade was pleased to have acquired a valuable new client.

    • Philips is a research driven organization which means they have tried lots of innovations. During discussions this leads quite often to “Oh nice idea but we’ve tried that and it didn’t work”. If not handled carefully this can result in a discussion on tiny details while losing the bigger picture. Therefore I emphasized how we designed a different user experience, maybe with the same hardware, but with a completely different execution.

    • Actively stimulating the use of a personality (assistant) within a product is very challenging. Balancing the personality traits of a brand (such as Philips) with the sub brand of products and then matching those to the personal preferences of the user is tricky. The on-boarding process of the device should be designed in such a way that the user can quickly adapt it to his or her personal taste.

    • Products that have a global presence require careful research to determine features that fit a certain demographic. We learned that the Chinese users value the status symbol of the device much more than Western European users. Where one might place it in their living-room the other stows it away in a cupboard.

An integrated approach to car navigation

TomTom | 2017-2019 | Product/Interaction Designer

  • TomTom asked us to develop a prototype of a new car operating system, integrated in one coherent physical cockpit. This demonstrator would be used with their clients in the automotive industry and act as a starting point for their internal development teams.

  • Together with the other product designer I was responsible for the physical demonstrator and the interactions with the steering wheel. Using cardboard modeling we determined the rough shape, we then divided the model in two parts so we could work simultaneously to speed up the process.

    • The entire car serves as, or will serve as, an interface. If all the different elements are not well-aligned, the perceived quality of individual touchpoints will be reduced. This is a missed opportunity that many existing car manufacturers still overlook. They are trying to outsource large parts of their development but too often this results in poorly integrated systems with mediocre UX.

    • By developing a prototype which offers multi-modal interactions; touchscreen, touchpad, physical buttons, turn-dials, voice, smartphone and intelligence you get a better understanding on how those different elements work together. There is no clear crossover point for this action is voice and this a button press.

    • The power of these seamless interactions lies in how attention and personal preferences shift very quickly within a car. The moment you’re in front of a traffic light the central touchscreen feels intuitive to use while moments later a glance of your eyes should be sufficient to answer a phone call. Providing people with the means to always feel in control no matter the circumstances.

Building my own open source wikihouse

Personal | 2021 - 2024 | Design, Constructor

  • Like many people, my girlfriend and I were looking to settle somewhere in Amsterdam. That proved to be too expenseive, especially because we would love to have our own garden. Then I stumbled upon the Wikihouse project, a concept that enables novice builders to construct their own home. All parts come pre-milled, combined with an extensive manual to guide you through the steps. We applied and got a lot for a project in Almere, a city close to Amsterdam.

  • Building a house isn’t your typical weekend project, it was way bigger than anything I’ve done before. However, with my experience as a designer I was able to use an iterative design process. I’ve created the whole house in a 3D environment which enabled us to quickly iterate on the floor plans. It also allowed us to get a feeling of the space in VR, long before the first pillars went into the ground.

    During the construction phase I’ve continued to make use of my digital skills to sketch interior ideas, electric and plumbing plans, and construction details. These documents helped prevent mistakes and helped achieving tighter integrations, resulting in a more beautiful and unique home.

Strategic directions for a new category of smartphones

Oppo | 2021 | Product Designer, Research & Strategy

  • This project had two parts. First smartphone maker Oppo asked us to explore the market and come up with new strategic directions for a new technology they have. After presenting our research to their team we designed new concepts to make that research tangible.

  • I created a research deck that contained different strategic directions for future development of smartphones.

    Together with the client several directions were selected as the starting point for the team to generate (lots of) ideas. These ideas were explored using sketching and then translated into physical mock-ups, serving as props in a photoshoot. The outcome was a comprehensive deck showcasing new concept phones in context, combined with supporting research and strategy.

    • Developing new concepts for smartphones made me realize that the success of a concept isn’t determined by the features it provides. How these features are supported, by one manufacturer, over multiple years is equally important to make it stick. This is the large advantage of Apple, when they introduce a new feature widespread adoption happens immediately and developers can be sure that it will be supported for many years to come.

    • Cross ecosystem user experiences are key for Android to deliver innovations that stick and make actual use of the strengths of the large and diverse Android ecosystem, instead of it being a weakness. Competitors within this ecosystem are in a strange relationship with each other where their success partly depends on working together while being different.

    • The client had Chinese origins, and during several meetings, we required a translator for effective communication. I noticed that the younger generation was proficient in English, enabling us to delve into essential nuances of a concept. However, in meetings with a translator, these subtleties often got lost in translation. This resulted in contradictory feedback which slowed down the process.

Exploring smarter dumb products

Handmade | 2018 | Product Designer, Research

  • While in between projects, Handmade stimulated us to develop internal projects. Together with one of the software developers we decided to get weird and play around with cameras, sensors & machine learning to experiment with new interactions for a smarter water tap.

  • In the past, I made fun of many smart products because of how poorly they performed and how limited their feedback and feedforward systems were. But over time, smart products became better and people got used to them. However, smart products sometimes fail or have unexpected responses. We should consider those when thinking about the experience of the user. I believe we don’t have to design for all the edge cases as long as we design the product in such a way that it enables the user to play, discover and understand what’s happening. 

    I’ve collected all my learning’s, observations and reflections into a medium article. Over there you can read why it's fine that a water tap doesn’t recognize a cat.

    • Enable people to update their mental models. As a kid, you’ve played with products and discovered that a chair has many use cases. Playing helps in creating a mental model of a product, making it more predictable and providing a sense of control. In order for people to explore a product,  they need to be ableto understand the relation between cause and effect. When adding new functionalities to a product there needs to be a safe environment in which people can play with those functionalities in order for them to update their mental model.

    • Use the full capabilities of human bodies. Humans move, sometimes in clumsy ways, often in pure harmony with the products they use. Have a look at the choreography of movements you make when entering the bathroom, a twist of the wrist, turn the body, flip the light switch, pull down and sit down, all in one fluent movement. Try teaching this to a robot. Dumb products are built for our bodies. But more often than not we see smarter products that remove physical interfaces and slap on a simple touch screen. We need to build smarter products in such a way that we can combine digital interfaces with physical interactions. This way we can use our muscle memory to decrease the cognitive load required to perform everyday tasks.

    • Products and people are slowly replaced over time. A new smarter product is often sold with the perfect ecosystem in mind, but no one has this perfect ecosystem. We simply don’t replace all of our products every two years, luckily. Therefore, a new product has to play nicely with the older products it is surrounded with. The same is true for who is going to use the product. Shared products in your household will be used by many types of people,ranging from your little kid to grandma. Smarter products need to, at least partly, accommodate to the mental models of those wide range of users.

Exploring interactions for a fitness mirror

Samsung | 2020 | UX Designer

  • Samsung asked us to create an interactive prototype for a new product category that they are exploring. In this project we focused a lot of time on designing a new UX model for a fitness mirror.

  • Collaborating with the principal team lead, we brainstormed new experiences for the proposed device. After sorting through the ideas, we merged them into a coherent storyline that would guide the device's presentation. I also crafted an interaction framework tailored to the device's capabilities and functionality.

    • While creating the UX model, we encountered numerous edge cases that disrupted the proposed structure. The client wanted to blend two different directions, but in hindsight, we should have advised selecting only one. Dealing with the different edge cases took a lot of time and iterations to get right.

    • We all have a basic understanding of how a smartphone functions, which stimulates intuition for certain ideas. However, throughout the design of new interactions, it was crucial to have the product within reach, because the device type was still  unfamiliar to us. Having it nearby allowed us to “kill” potentially "promising" ideas and update our frame of reference.

    • Technology constantly evolves, which means that ideas that used to be too expensive might now actually be feasible. This is a fallacy every designer has to keep in mind, continuously challenge your own assumptions in order to avoid missing out on new innovations.

The Out-Of-Box experience of cloud gaming

Dell | 2021 | Team/UX Lead

  • Dell asked us to envision & demonstrate how a new type of gaming product can be used in different types of households and environments.

  • Because Dell wanted to see how their product could be implemented in different environments, we decided to tackle this project with a story-driven approach. We started by coming up with a storyline and sketching storyboards. After validating the storyline, we created the physical assets needed for the final video.

    Due to the focus on the interaction we went for lo-fi prototypes and spent most time on animating the interactions. I think we struck the right balance in this project between fidelity and speed. Dell was really content with our work, you might have seen a glimpse of our work at CES 2022.

The transition to cross ecosystem user experiences

“I believe that smart environments should feel as good friends coming over. You know them by heart, can largely predict how they will behave and you will notice it if someone has a problem. You understand them and trust that they have the best intentions for and with you.”

Masters Graduation Project - Cum Laude | 2017 |

  • Personal data holds immense potential to enhance our daily lives, yet this valuable information remains fragmented across various companies and ecosystems. These entities often lack mutual trust, compatibility, and willingness to collaborate. How can we navigate towards a more favorable future in terms of harnessing our personal data effectively?

  • Software: A personal assistant that helps you manage your personal data stored in your personal vault. During the on-boarding your preferences are taken into account. This changes how Proxy will manage your data. If you’re a very conscious user it will limit API calls and notify you more often if a service would like to obtain access. If you are not that concerned less notifications will appear and a more seamless integration will be automatically available.

    Hardware: This wearable changes color, very slowly to notify the user. This change of color can mean that a device requested access to personal data, e.g. a door lock. Or that the behavior of a service changed. For example a fastfood chain suddenly started asking for your location 200 times a day.

    When the user is confronted with a situation in which his or her personal data isn’t used properly a simple swipe on the wrist is enough to let the assistant know that at that moment something went wrong.

  • Designing a solution for this problem isn’t your typical - research - build - test - iterate - validate - succeed story. At this moment I had 5 years of design processes under my belt but this one was different. During this project I felt insecure about the end deliverable because it wouldn’t be a nicely packaged product that could be user validated easily. But I did feel attracted to the complexity of the systems surrounding the problem. I ended up proposing a system for decentralized personal data storage, a personal data assistant to help the user in managing the overload of data and a wearable that acts as simple in and output to reassure the user and train the assistant. 

    • We all have a basic understanding of how a smartphone functions, which stimulates intuition for certain ideas. However, throughout the design of new interactions, it was crucial to have the product within reach, because the device type was still  unfamiliar to us. Having it nearby allowed us to “kill” potentially "promising" ideas and update our frame of reference.

    • Technology constantly evolves, which means that ideas that used to be too expensive might now actually be feasible. This is a fallacy every designer has to keep in mind, continuously challenge your own assumptions in order to avoid missing out on new innovations.

Developing a new type of ground waterpump

Competition - sponsorship | 2012 | Initiator

  • Samsung asked us to create an interactive prototype for a new product category that they are exploring. In this project we focused a lot of time on designing a new UX model for a fitness mirror.

  • Collaborating with the principal team lead, we brainstormed new experiences for the proposed device. After sorting through the ideas, we merged them into a coherent storyline that would guide the device's presentation. I also crafted an interaction framework tailored to the device's capabilities and functionality.

    • While creating the UX model, we encountered numerous edge cases that disrupted the proposed structure. The client wanted to blend two different directions, but in hindsight, we should have advised selecting only one. Dealing with the different edge cases took a lot of time and iterations to get right.

    • We all have a basic understanding of how a smartphone functions, which stimulates intuition for certain ideas. However, throughout the design of new interactions, it was crucial to have the product within reach, because the device type was still  unfamiliar to us. Having it nearby allowed us to “kill” potentially "promising" ideas and update our frame of reference.

    • Technology constantly evolves, which means that ideas that used to be too expensive might now actually be feasible. This is a fallacy every designer has to keep in mind, continuously challenge your own assumptions in order to avoid missing out on new innovations.

Co-create the future of public streetlighting

Competition - winner | 2014 | Teamlead

  • Samsung asked us to create an interactive prototype for a new product category that they are exploring. In this project we focused a lot of time on designing a new UX model for a fitness mirror.

  • Collaborating with the principal team lead, we brainstormed new experiences for the proposed device. After sorting through the ideas, we merged them into a coherent storyline that would guide the device's presentation. I also crafted an interaction framework tailored to the device's capabilities and functionality.

    • While creating the UX model, we encountered numerous edge cases that disrupted the proposed structure. The client wanted to blend two different directions, but in hindsight, we should have advised selecting only one. Dealing with the different edge cases took a lot of time and iterations to get right.

    • We all have a basic understanding of how a smartphone functions, which stimulates intuition for certain ideas. However, throughout the design of new interactions, it was crucial to have the product within reach, because the device type was still  unfamiliar to us. Having it nearby allowed us to “kill” potentially "promising" ideas and update our frame of reference.

    • Technology constantly evolves, which means that ideas that used to be too expensive might now actually be feasible. This is a fallacy every designer has to keep in mind, continuously challenge your own assumptions in order to avoid missing out on new innovations.

As you can see, I've worked across quite a range of innovations. From initial vaguely described concepts to creating advanced product demos that have traveled the world to inspire users, clients, and stakeholders. I don't just envision alternative futures, I actively build them. If you have a challenge that needs this blend of strategic thinking and hands-on creation, I'd love to discuss how we might collaborate.