The work referred to throughout this section. Hover any card for the full backgrounder.
How my five expertise areas developed across my bachelor, internship and Final Bachelor Project.
Viewing Year 1.
User and Society has always shaped how I judge whether a design direction is meaningful. Through Project 3, Dressd, I learned that being user-centred is not the same as accepting the first stakeholder request. Although the initial direction was a simple instruction app, this would not have fully supported the children’s independence. By moving towards a hybrid physical-digital RFID system with multimodal instructions, I learned to question whether a solution truly empowers users, or only makes a task easier to manage.
Image shows the Project 3 (dressd) final demoday set up
During my Philips Hue internship, this understanding matured within a corporate product context. I learned that representing users in a large organisation requires more than repeating customer feedback. It means interpreting reviews, support signals and usage data to understand which needs matter most, then communicating those needs clearly between engineering, UX, quality, marketing and finance. This changed my view of User and Society from something focused mainly on early research, towards a responsibility that continues throughout launch, monitoring, refinement and long-term product use.
During my Final Bachelor Project, HoldOn, User and Society became one of my strongest areas of development. At the start, one of my main goals was to build a grounded understanding of phone scams from the perspectives of older adults, relatives and professionals, rather than designing from assumptions. Through theory, expert input and interviews, the project shifted from a broad concern about scams towards understanding phone scams as real-time pressure situations.
My initial assumption was that the project might become educational or preventative. However, research showed that awareness alone is not enough when scammers create urgency, uncertainty and trust in the moment of the call. This changed the direction towards HoldOn: an AI-mediated call-screening system that creates a pause between unknown callers and the older adult.
This helped me achieve my goal of designing for vulnerability without undermining agency. Participants wanted different levels of control: some wanted to always decide, while others preferred high-risk scam or nuisance calls to be blocked. This led to configurable protection modes for low, medium and high-risk calls. Through HoldOn, I learned that inclusive design is not about one ideal solution, but about supporting different relationships with risk, confidence and autonomy.
Persona cards for HoldOn
