About
Who am I?
My name is Bas Botermans. I am studying Industrial Design since 2003. My bachelor I did at the University of Technology in Eindhoven (TU/e) at the department of Industrial Design (ID). I am following the master program Design For Interaction (DFI) at the Delft University of Technology (TUD) at the department of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE).
I always had a fascination for consumer electronics, computers and everything digital. Along comes the ever so critical attitude towards products and their interfaces. Screen interfaces as well as physical interfaces like remote controls with badly written guides.
I started like most students as a user that had the dream of being a designer. Back then it was easy to put yourself in the role of the end user and see how they would respond to it. Years past and knowledge about the possibilities grew. Suddenly I realized that I was not that unaware user anymore. I became the designer that was getting farther and farther away from the normal user’s experience. At that moment I realized the need of understanding the user instead of building on assumptions that stems from my own experience.
Nowadays technology is becoming a bigger part in people’s lives. In the beginning they accept it the way it came and interacted it in the way the technology prescribed. Remember the MS DOS prompt? How many times you needed to call the tech support guy because it did not work anymore? Who could imagine that we want to stay connected to our friends virtually to see what they are doing or catch up by typing messages to each other. Fear of technology is slowly fading and blending with everyday life. Why is the interaction than still based on screens and keyboards?
In my opinion it is because people are used to being dictated by technology and technologists are not aware of the needs of people. Interaction designers who know both worlds could bridge this misunderstanding. Working from interaction as a starting point would change the way people use their products in a more understandable way and forget they are working with technology but still using the benefits it brings.
This is what I used to do in my bachelor’s degree. During my master I realized that there is another side of the coin. Which is trying to get user insights by showing them the possibilities of technology. The end goal here is not creating a product, but to get information and inspiration of how people experience a phenomenon.
During my studies I came across different methods like interviews, questionnaires, cultural probes and contextmapping. These methods are used to get an inside of people’s lives but are sometimes hard to do because people have no words to describe how they experience a phenomenon.
That is why I want to give people an experience with an artefact that embodies these intangibles of the phenomenon. This way they can reflect on the phenomenon by using the physical factors of the artefact to talk about the phenomenon. I use technology to get a grip on the intangibles and produce and ambiguous output that leaves the meaning open to interpretation by the user. The ambiguity helps to see how people experience the phenomenon and leave space for new interpretations that were overlooked by the designer. This way it opens up the design space for creating products that would fit the user more closely.