Hi, welcome to my portfolio! My name is Jeppe Groen. I am an Industrial Design student at Eindhoven University of Technology, I am now doing my master graduation project. On this website, you can find previous design projects I have done as well as a description of my identity and vision as a designer.
As a designer, creativity and technical skills are the expertises that I value most. Creativity is needed to be able to come up with novel solutions, but these ideas are worthless if they cannot be tested in the real world; this requires technical realization. I am a creative person, as well as a technical person. I like to solve problems with smart, technological solutions. I can come up with innovative ideas and concepts and put them into a concrete design. I also have technical insight; I can think of how a product can be realized and how to conceptualize an idea using technology. Working with electronics, programming microcontrollers, and 3D modeling are some of my strong suits. I strive to be a designer with a broad skill set that has expertise in multiple areas. I like to make—and get inspired by—designs that are functional, have tangible interaction, and are aesthetically pleasing.
I like making electronic music, so I love to design new products that help people make music in a new, easy way. In the past, I have made MIDI controllers and a tangible drum sequencer, did research on tangible synthesizers, and did other musical experiments.
I always want to finish my work to the best of my ability and improve the smaller details. This is one of my strengths, but it can be a weakness if I never stop optimizing and unnecessarily spend too much time on a certain part. I can also work organized and like to work on bigger projects, but I can also tend to procrastinate when I have tasks to do that I like less.
In the future, I would like to become a designer who invents new tangible and interactive products and systems that are fun to use. I want to think of creative ideas and design aesthetically pleasing products, but I also want to come up with the technical aspects and make them function properly.
The word design has a broad definition, it can have a different meaning for everyone. I think of design in general as a tool to enable humans to express themselves, help them fulfill their goals, or make their tasks easier to execute. Technology and design can open new opportunities and spark new ideas that would not have existed otherwise. I think that almost every design can be thought of as a 'tool' in one way or another.
I would like to create tools that help people to be more creative and express themselves creatively. I think that having fun and being happy are some of the main goals in life and being able to express creativity plays a big part in achieving this. Making music is a source of happiness for me, so I would love to design for music and musicians to enable them to create music in new ways. This helps them to do something that they could not have done without the design.
Industrial Designers create the way users interact with products and systems and are therefore responsible for shaping their user experience. I believe designers should strive to design interactions with the best possible user experience. I want to make music-making tools accessible for beginners, and the way interactions are designed is key to achieving this.
As technology has advanced in the last decades, user interfaces have shifted from physical devices to digital screens. Displays allow for a lot more versatility in interfaces, but the interaction it provides is lacking. Furthermore, physical interfaces also do not always create good user experiences. Electronic music-making tools often use the same 'weak-generic' interfaces for multiple functions, making it hard to learn what a function does when the interaction is the same. I believe that 'strong-specific' interfaces that take principles from tangible and embodied interaction into account can provide a natural, intuitive interaction, be efficient to use, and provide an enhanced user experience, especially in music-making. Therefore, I hope to see tangible user interfaces incorporated more frequently in design in the future.
I envision a future where design enables humans to do things that are now considered hard to do, or even impossible. It might even allow us to do things that no one has even thought about doing yet. The rapid rate at which new technology is developed allows for this, but new creative ideas are the other part of the equation. Nowadays, products are still designed to be practical, but I believe designing for fun will become more prevalent in the future.
