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 vision and identity as a designer.
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.
Toward the end of my Industrial Design bachelor’s, I started developing my interest in designing electronic music-making tools as well as tangible user interfaces. During my master’s I got to explore these two fields extensively and got to combine both interests. My bachelor education gave me a good foundation for design, but I feel like I have only truly discovered my strong suits and who I want to be as a designer during my master’s. I learned a lot during my final master project, but my projects, electives, and other activities already broadened my skills in all expertise areas beforehand. I describe my development in the five expertise areas below, but make sure to check the projects and activities section for more in-depth information about specific projects.
I developed my Creativity and Aesthetics skills with my activities by designing game concepts in my M1.1 project, using various materials with a material-centered design approach in interactive materiality, and exploring sound design for smart systems in the sound of smart things. I developed my skills in conceptualizing tangible user interfaces by coming up with various tangible interactions in my M1.2 research project. I then further developed these skills with my M2.1 project, where the goal was to explore a wide variety of interface designs. Ultimately, I applied everything I learned from these projects in my FMP, applying tangible and embodied interaction for functions that benefit from it but I also realized that not all interactions have to be strong-specific. Before my FMP, one of my learning goals was to explore tangible and embodied interaction further, which I succeeded in. The things I learned from the sound of smart things were applied in my FMP as well, the new way of listening to everyday sounds around you shaped my approach to using recorded sounds to create music.
I value the skills that I have in technology and realization highly, I enjoy making working prototypes and I think that technological implementation is important to evaluate a design. This is especially the case with electronic musical instruments since these require a functional implementation to communicate the concept, the audio feedback inherently requires technology.
I learned a lot of new skills in this expertise area, starting with using augmented reality in Unity for my M1.1 project. I had worked with Unity before this, but I had not yet used augmented reality. I think augmented reality can also be useful for creating tangible interactions, which I perhaps still want to explore in the future. Previous projects often used solid materials such as wood or plastic 3D prints, but interactive materiality taught me how to make prototypes with soft materials. My M1.2 project challenged me to program a synthesizer, I further expanded my audio implementation capabilities with my M2.1 project. In these projects, I also learned more about electronics by using various components that were new to me.
Even though I developed myself a lot in Technology and Realization through past projects and courses, I still learned many new things during my FMP. Previous music projects often used a laptop for the audio processing, but I now implemented all audio standalone with the Teensy Audio Board, which I never used before. I also designed a custom printable circuit board for the first time, and learned how to program visuals on a small OLED screen. All these new aspects introduced a learning curve for me which made it challenging to implement all at the same time, but I am glad that I have learned these things as I think they will be valuable for future projects.
This expertise area was implemented in all my main projects in the form of user testing, which I now have a lot of experience with. My M1.2 research project gave me a whole new perspective to user testing, as this project focused on research. For this project, I learned how to conduct a comparative study and took the concept of a pilot study more seriously. At the end of my M2.1 project, I received feedback that I lost the purpose of doing user tests, I did not focus my tests on evaluating the aspects that were actually important for my project. At the start of my FMP, I stated the goals of the project clearly. When I did my user test, I made sure to revisit those goals to make sure that my evaluation method was suitable; I ended up doing a more qualitative evaluation while previous projects were more quantitative. In my FMP, I also did a shorter user evaluation halfway through the project to evaluate a concept before fully implementing it. This was extremely useful, I found that the concept I evaluated was too complicated and I ended up ditching it based on the results. I also received expert feedback during my FMP from a professional working in the field of synthesizers.
The expertise area of Math, Data and Computing was implemented in multiple projects, but it was never my main focus. User tests from the projects generated data that had to be analyzed, and graphs visualizing the data were often made. I got to explore this expertise area more with conversational design with multi-modalities (Terra) where I learned how to prototype a conversational agent that responds to speech using machine learning. This expertise area did play a more prevalent role in my FMP however, working with audio recordings required specific data analysis of the audio input, and computing power and memory storage had to be taken into account. The recorder device shows the audio waveform of a recording on a small OLED screen, a data visualization that I created myself. Furthermore, some math was involved in working with audio as well since audio usually behaves logarithmically. Math functions were made to convert linear inputs to logarithmic outputs and to convert musical semitones to playback speed in order to change the pitch of a sound according to a musical scale.
Business and Entrepreneurship is the expertise area that I personally have the least interest in. However, I do realize that it is an important area since there is no reason to design a product that nobody would be willing to buy and use. I still developed myself in this field, first with Spaces Experiences. This activity gave me more experience in networking and promoting a product, I also learned what aspects are involved in the creation of a start-up company. My job at the 3D print farm also gave me more experience in business aspects such as handling customers and administration. My main learning activity in this expertise area was my internship at Dato Musical Instruments (TACT) where I got to experience what working as a designer at a company is like and learned more about how products are designed for the market. In my FMP, I did market research and analyzed competitors using a competitor analysis matrix. Furthermore, I listed possible application contexts for the product that could be explored.
In my master, I realized that my passion lies in designing music-making experiences, so I would like to be able to continue with this in the future. I chose the RDD track since I think that working at a company fits me well, I am less interested in pursuing an academic career. Although business is not my strong suit, I do not rule out creating a start-up company later in the future. However, I will first try to gain experience in the field by working at a design company. I would love to work at Dato Musical Instruments, where I did my internship, since their approach fits well with my vision of creating accessible music-making tools while other instrument makers are more targeted towards professionals. The chance of being hired there is slim since they are only a small company consisting of three people, meaning that they do not need new employees often. However, I will keep in contact with them and will try to visit them soon since they have a bigger network in the music instrument industry, they might be able to recommend the next steps for me.
