Hi, welcome to my portfolio! My name is Jeppe Groen. I am an Industrial Designer who is passionate about electronic music instruments. I received my Masters degree in Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology. On this website, you can find previous design projects I have done as well as a description of my vision and identity as a designer. Have a look around!
Design as a discipline has a broad definition; it can have a different meaning for everyone. I think of design in general as a method of making tools that 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 designed thing can be thought of as a 'tool' in one way or another. These tools can be utilitarian, but can also have hedonic purposes depending on the goals of the user.
I specifically 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. This happiness should be accessible to anyone who wants to achieve it, this is why I am mainly interested in creating music-making tools that are accessible and enjoyable to anyone, including people without prior musical knowledge.
Industrial designers create the way users interact with products and systems and are therefore responsible for shaping human experiences. I believe designers should strive to design interactions that result in an enjoyable experience. In my context, this would be the joy of music creation. 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 and are cost-efficient, but the experience they provide is limited. 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 use principles from tangible and embodied interaction can provide a natural, intuitive interaction, be efficient to use, and provide an enhanced user experience. I believe this to especially be the case in electronic music-making; people need freedom and control to create the music they want but interfaces with too many controls can easily become cluttered and unclear. Strong-specific interactions can address this. Therefore, I hope to see tangible and embodied interactions incorporated more frequently in interface design in electronic music in the future.
I envision a future where design enables humans to achieve their goals simply and intuitively, without the need to read full manuals before understanding a system. The rapid rate at which new technology is developed allows for more natural interactions, 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.
As a designer, creativity and technical skills are the expertises that I value most. These expertise areas go hand in hand; 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 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 am familiar with various ideating methods and can visualize my ideas with sketches. In my vision, I mention that I believe that tangible and embodied interactions should be utilized more in the design of musical instruments, creativity is needed to conceptualize these new interactions.
I also have technical insight; I can think of how a product can be realized and how to implement an idea using technology. Working with electronics, programming microcontrollers, and 3D modeling are some of my strong suits. I am a hands-on designer and I strive to have a broad skill set that has expertise in multiple areas, such as electrical and mechanical engineering. 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 value creating an enjoyable user experience highly, this should always be evaluated through user testing, which I have experience with from multiple projects.
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, specifically electronic music-making tools that are accessible to anyone. 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.
