Projects
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Exploring hybrid design processes through digital and craft based un/making
2025
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Dissolving a House Through 3D Modeling to Create a Mobile Co-Habitation Setup
2024
Groupproject
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Questioning Norms Through a Personal Food-Based Wearable Archive
2023
Internship
Industrial Design Engineering
@Fontys Venlo
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A sculptural desk lamp designed at Ingo Maurer
2022
Courses
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Ignite
2023
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Paradox
2023
Exchange
At the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), I took a range of courses that helped me to dive deeper into different areas of design that draw my interests and can be used as tools in the industry, incorporating how to use light, production chains, and a new prototype method. Each course had theory lessons followed by a hands-on approach in groups, which helped me strengthen my skills in testing, iterating, and creating flexible design solutions in a group context.
Agile Prototyping
Course @DTU
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2024
Mass Customization
Course @DTU
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2024
Daylight and Lighting
Course @DTU
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2024
Past
I enrolled at Fontys Venlo University of Applied Sciences in 2019 for the BSc program in Industrial Product Design. The program combined technology and design, with a focus on the development and production of industrially manufactured consumer and capital goods. I developed a strong foundation in mechanics, construction, production techniques, technical drawing, and prototyping. Through internships as a model builder and designer, I primarily worked on the realization side of the design process, creating CAD models and physical prototypes in workshops and makerspaces. Whether independently or in a team, I learned to guide the product development process from concept to final product.
However, working in companies made me reflect critically on the role of design in industry. I realized that design often revolved around fulfilling client needs or aligning with company identities, leading to repetitive processes, tight contracts, and little room for alternative approaches. During my bachelor graduation project at Ingo Maurer in Munich, I experienced a different way of working. There, I saw how design could be emotionally charged, expressive, and materially poetic. This made me want to explore how we interact with everyday objects in more surprising and fulfilling ways, beyond efficiency or function. Coming from an HBO background, I also sought to strengthen my academic and methodological skills.
I began my master's at Industrial Design (TU/e) with my M1.1 project in the Crafting Wearable Senses (CWS) Squad. I was drawn to their methodological approaches and idea of digital craftsmanship at the squad. Our group project, Food to Fabric, investigated how food waste could be transformed into wearable materials. This exposed me to first-person research [1] and opened up an interest in transformation, not just in material terms, but as a design approach.
My M1.2 research project deepened this interest. I immersed myself in a living-with approach, engaging with un/making [2], a method I now see as central to my future work. This way of working and building a small space living environment by myself reminded me of what I originally loved about design: the puzzle-like quality of CAD and the satisfaction of solving technical challenges. But now, I approached these with a more reflective and experimental mindset.
To build on this blend of hard skills and exploratory research, I pursued an exchange semester at DTU, where I followed both design- and engineering-oriented courses. This helped me integrate my background in industrial product design with the research methodologies of ID. I learned to integrate technical production methods and frame digital making in Rhino (Grasshopper) as a form of inquiry and exploration.
All of these experiences led to my final master project, where I explored how discarded furniture could be digitally unmade and physically (re)made through hybrid design processes. This project allowed me to combine CAD, craft, and digital tools—not only to solve problems, but to ask new questions about design, objects, and meaning through transformation.
Present
Two years at TU/e have supported me in developing a hybrid design practice that is deeply rooted in making, material exploration, and reflecting through design. I am shaped as a design researcher by experimental processes that connect digital and physical domains. Looking back, I see all expertise areas covered well by my portfolio, with a greater significance on Creativity and Aesthetics and Technology and Realization.
Encountering Creativity and Aesthetics through Digital Craftsmanship [4]
Creativity and aesthetics emerge most clearly through the act of making and digital craftsmanship [2] especially when working between digital and physical tools. I often start by exploring form and motion in software, where distortion and abstraction become ways of discovering rather than planning. These experiments are rarely clean or controlled. Instead, they feel like conversations with the tool—tweaking parameters, breaking things, following accidents. I bring that same openness into the physical world, where working hands-on with materials reveals other qualities: resistance, balance, texture, or fragility.
My aesthetic decisions are shaped by how things feel in the hand or behave while encountering them through making. I treat both software and materials as collaborators with their own suggestions. Over time, I’ve learned that shifting between intuitive making and critical reflection is important to capturing moments that feel right, to making informed design decisions, and to generating design knowledge.
Thinking Through Technology and Realization
For me, Technology and Realization is not just about technical implementation—it’s a way of thinking through design. My background in product design taught me to treat tools like CAD not merely as representational, but as generative. 3D modeling, scripting, and digital prototyping allow me to visualize and explore ideas directly in form, often before they are fully conceptualized. During my master’s, I began integrating sensors, projection mapping, and real-time data manipulation through tools like TouchDesigner, which expanded my understanding of how technical systems can shape experience and expression. I use these technologies not to finish ideas, but to discover them, to play with parameters, test behaviors, and follow what emerges [3]. This way of working has deepened my connection to making: hardware and software don’t feel like endpoints, but extensions of material thinking. Being able to communicate across disciplines and read technical documentation has become part of how I ideate. In this way, Technology and Realization is not separate from Creativity and Aesthetics—it actively supports it by giving me new tools to explore, distort, and construct meaning through form.
Questioning norms of Users and Society and Co-creating
For me, design is an examination of everyday life; of routines, habits and unspoken norms. Users are not a target group to be analyzed, but active co-creators of an open process. In my work, I use methods such as cultural probes, co-creation sessions or field observations to understand how people relate to objects and their environment. I am not only interested in functional needs, but also in interpretations, values and emotional connections. I consciously work with openness and ambiguity in order to create spaces in which people can create meaning themselves - instead of just reacting to preconceived concepts.
This approach requires sensitivity and a willingness to give up control. In developing my practice, I have learned to switch between perspectives, to engage with other perspectives and to see uncertainty as productive. For me, designing with a social perspective means not only acting responsibly, it is about staying curious, asking better questions, and letting go of control to see where the design process emerges.
Business and Enterpreneurship: Between creative openness and entrepreneurial reality
For Business & Entrepreneurship, I have learned to align creative design processes with economic and practical feasibility. I experienced Business & Entrepreneurship not as a contrast to creative exploration, but as an extension of my understanding of how design can have an impact. In the early stages of my FMP, the focus was on open, experimental methods: digital transformation, material reconstructions and speculative approaches to shifting the meaning of furniture. It was only later, through conversations with stakeholders from the local craft, second-hand and cultural sectors, that I realized how important it is to embed creative approaches into existing networks, infrastructures and economic realities.
I learned that entrepreneurial thinking does not necessarily have to have to do with traditional markets, but also means recognizing potential for social or circular value creation and communicating it in a targeted manner. In the process, my creative network itself became a resource - not just for implementing ideas, but for helping to shape them. Through this process, I was able to sharpen my understanding of how creativity can work in a business context: not by scaling back experiments, but by being strategically connected. B&E helped me to consciously position my role as a designer between exploration and realization.
Future
What happens next?
I do not see my future in a traditional academic career but in practical, design-oriented work that combines research-based design with concrete implementation. My goal is to realize independent design projects that interweave digital technologies, craft processes, and social issues.
A key insight from my final project, Phantom Furniture, was the importance of collaborative formats for creative processes. Working with other designers, especially in co-creative settings, has shown me that new perspectives open up in the shared examination of material, form, and meaning - even across disciplinary boundaries. For this reason, I am planning to found a design collective in the near future that will function as a platform for experimental, collaborative work.
In terms of my future work, I would like to continue dealing with hybrid processes in which digital tools, like TouchDesigner, CAD, or projection techniques, are not understood as an end in themselves, but as a starting point for new forms of making. I am interested in the connection between speculative design, material practice, and critical reflection: How can new narratives be generated through the conscious deformation, un/making, or reassembly of objects? What role does temporality play in design?
In the long term, I aim to develop my own design formats in the form of exhibitions, open workshops, or interdisciplinary collaborations in which design can be experienced as a researching, meaningful, and creative-productive practice.
[1] O. Tomico, V. O. Winthagen, and M. M. G. Van Heist. 2012. Designing for, with or within: 1st, 2nd and 3rd person points of view on designing for systems. In Proceedings of the 7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Making Sense Through Design, ACM, Copenhagen Denmark, 180–188. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2399016.2399045
[2] K. Lindström and Å. Ståhl. 2020. Un/Making in the Aftermath of Design. In Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020 - Participation(s) Otherwise - Volume 1 (PDC ’20), Association for Computing Machinery, Manizales, Colombia, 12–21. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3385010.3385012
[3] W. Gaver, P. Gall Krogh, A. Boucher, and D.Chatting. 2022. Emergence as a Feature of Practice-based Design Research. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 517–526. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533524
[4] B,Goveia da Rocha, J. Spork, and K. Andersen. 2022. Making Matters: Samples and Documentation in Digital Craftsmanship. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 37, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3490149.3502261
Hi,
I am Robin.
I design
transformative objects
that reshape our everyday encounters and environments
Vision
I see design as a critical practice of questioning, not answering, as a way of making complex relationships visible, tangible, and negotiable. Our world is permeated by technological, material, and social interdependencies that cannot be dealt with using linear solutions. Instead, design is needed as a means of exploring these interdependencies by making, by questioning, and by un/making.
My roots in product design have given me a structured understanding of form, function, and user preference. But it was only by consciously reconnecting with the craft, with the physical work with material, that I learned to understand design as a processual and personal act. The combination of digital tools and haptic experience allows me to develop hybrid design processes that combine technical knowledge with sensual exploration.
I move between product and industrial design, with a critical attitude towards established narratives. Through making, I look for new perspectives on existing things, whether it is a piece of furniture, an interface, or a material. In this process, it is more important to me to ask questions than to provide answers. Because I believe that design doesn't always have to solve problems, but it can help to make our questions more precise, richer, and more meaningful.
Professional Identity
As a design researcher, I work at the intersection between digital technology and making as research. My foundation in product design - CAD, Prototyping and Fabrication - evolved to a research-oriented practice throughout my master's studies. Through first-person exploration [1], speculative design methods, and the combined use of digital tools and craftsmanship, I have evolved my personal design approach.
I see design as a medium to reimagine everyday objects, reinterpret spatial experiences, and evoke the potential narrative of materials. My process is iterative and playful, mostly inspired by the concept of un/making [2], and enables a unique blend of functionality, aesthetics, and reflections. Rather than prioritizing the final outcome, I focus on the act of making and its transformative possibilities, for myself as well as for those who engage with my work.
My practice represents a deliberate choice to move away from standardized solutions towards engaging with the ambiguity of design [3] through a curiosity-driven making approach that reveals the unexpected beauty within the ordinary and takes alternative ways. I engage by using research through design [4], aiming to uncover new perspectives on objects, materials, and space.
[1] O. Tomico, V. O. Winthagen, and M. M. G. Van Heist. 2012. Designing for, with or within: 1st, 2nd and 3rd person points of view on designing for systems. In Proceedings of the 7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Making Sense Through Design, ACM, Copenhagen Denmark, 180–188. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2399016.2399045
[2] K. Lindström and Å. Ståhl. 2020. Un/Making in the Aftermath of Design. In Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020 - Participation(s) Otherwise - Volume 1 (PDC ’20), Association for Computing Machinery, Manizales, Colombia, 12–21. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3385010.3385012
[3] W Gaver, J. Beaver, and S. Benford. 2003. Ambiguity as a Resource for Design. In CHI ’03: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. April 5–10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA.Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 233–240.
[4] P. Stappers. and E. Giaccardi. 2014. Research through Design Retrieved June 29, 2025 from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/research-through-design
CONTACT
Curious to collaborate or just chat? I am always open to new conversations, ideas, or spontaneous projects. Let’s make something together!
Acknowledgements: This site is built using Cargo.