Hedde Buijs

I believe technology should support people without making them passive or dependent. Many modern products are becoming more intelligent, automated, and closed. This makes them powerful, but also harder to understand, repair, or control. I think design should make technical systems more transparent, adaptable, and meaningful in use. My interest in mechanical watches, drones, tools, and modular products strongly influences this vision. I am drawn to products where construction, interaction, and function can be understood, because they invite care, repair, and modification. To me, longevity is therefore not only physical durability. A long-lasting product should stay valuable when the user changes, when parts wear out, or when the context develops. Modularity, repairability, and clear interaction are important design qualities for me. During my bachelor, this vision shifted from objects alone toward interaction with technical systems.

My FBP made this clear. In FPV drone operation, spatial awareness could be solved through automation or obstacle avoidance. I chose a different direction: giving the pilot extra feedback while keeping control with the pilot. This reflects my broader position. Technology should strengthen human ability, not replace it without a clear reason. Whether I work on drones, mobility, tools, or interactive products, I want my designs to help people act with more awareness, confidence, and control.

I see myself as a technical and practical designer who likes to make ideas tangible. I often understand a design problem best when I can sketch, model, build, test, or translate it into a working interaction. This hands-on way of working has been present throughout my bachelor and remains one of my strongest qualities. At the same time, my identity has changed. In the beginning, I mainly focused on whether something worked technically. Now I also ask why it should work, who it is for, how it is experienced, and what value it creates over time. This moved me from mainly being a maker toward becoming a designer who connects technology, users, data, interaction, and future value. I enjoy building interactive systems, working with sensors and code, using CAD and prototyping tools, and shaping feedback into understandable interaction.

During my FBP, these strengths came together in creating a feedback system prototype with haptic, audio, and visual feedback. A weakness I still recognize is that I can become too focused on technical possibilities. During my FBP, I controlled this better by defining clearer criteria: the prototype had to improve spatial awareness, preserve pilot control, be testable, and fit the FPV context. This helped me make stronger decisions and redirect my process when needed.

In teamwork, I often create overview, motivate people, and help the project move forward by being often the first to take initiative. Earlier, I sometimes moved too fast or pushed too much from my own perspective. Over time, I learned to listen better, give more space to others, and use feedback earlier. I still like taking responsibility, but now try to do this by creating structure rather than taking over. I want to design technology that people can understand, repair, adapt, and trust, instead of black-box systems that remove the user from the interaction.

I have always learned by making. Before Industrial Design, I spent a lot of time building, repairing, and experimenting. Much of this started in my dad's shed, where I learned to work with tools, materials, and mechanisms by trying things out myself. Growing up around my father's sculptural work also made me more aware of form, materiality, and detail.

This practical background shaped how I entered Industrial Design. I was naturally drawn to prototyping, technical systems, 3D printing, Arduino, and mechanical solutions.

At TU/e, I learned that a working prototype alone is not enough: a design also needs to fit a user, context, and larger purpose. Looking back, my past laid the foundation for my current professional identity. I still approach design through making, but now use prototypes more consciously to explore, test, and communicate ideas. My interest shifted from only building technical objects toward designing understandable interactions with technology.

Technology & Realization is the area I have always felt closest to. I like understanding how things work, taking ideas apart, rebuilding them, and making prototypes that people can actually interact with. Earlier in my bachelor, this area was mainly about making things function. During the FBP, it became more about building the right prototype for the right question. My development in this area came through Creative Programming, Making Sense of Sensors, ITEC, Design Actuated Systems, and the CBL projects. These courses helped me work with code, electronics, sensors, actuators, CAD, 3D printing, laser cutting, and physical prototyping. They also taught me that technical realization is not only about making something work once. A prototype needs to be understandable, testable, stable, and documented well enough that others can respond to it. Creative Programming helped me translate ideas into interactive digital behaviour. Making Sense of Sensors made the connection between physical input and digital output more concrete. ITEC helped me think about technology in a broader system and communicate technical choices more clearly. Design Actuated Systems pushed this further by focusing on movement, actuation, mechanics, and the relation between physical behaviour and interaction. In earlier projects, Technology & Realization helped me communicate ideas quickly. In Rewinder, for example, I used CAD and mechanical prototyping to make modularity visible and understandable. This project connected strongly to my interest in repairable and long-lasting products, because the mechanism itself helped explain the value of the concept.

For my FBP, my PDP goal was to design and realize a robust multimodal prototype that operated in real time, remained stable during repeated testing sessions, and could be experienced during Demoday. I also wanted to explore simulation environments such as Unity or Gazebo to safely test interaction concepts for drones. I tackled this by building a working test setup that combined a Unity simulation with physical and digital feedback prototypes, I picked this road since I had already learned the basics of how to use unity through Games & Play I and II. The setup included a haptic headband, audio feedback through headphones, and visual feedback concepts for FPV goggles. The haptic headband used eight vibration points around the head to communicate direction. I also developed feedback patterns for distance and urgency. A major technical decision was to use simulation instead of testing with a real drone. At first, real drone testing seemed more exciting and realistic, but it would have introduced safety risks, uncontrolled variables, and too much technical uncertainty. By using Unity, I created a controlled environment where the feedback modalities could be compared more fairly. This helped me use simulation as a strategic design tool, not only as a technical add-on. Overall, I improved in Technology & Realization because I became better at balancing ambition and reliability. A next step is improving the physical finish and comfort of the haptic prototype by reducing pressure points, miniaturizing electronics, and testing longer-term wearability.

Creativity & Aesthetics is the area that first made me feel like I was designing, instead of only building. In the beginning, I mainly connected it to sketching, form, materials, and making something look finished. During my bachelor, this changed. I started to understand aesthetics as interaction: how something feels, how feedback is timed, how attention is guided, and how naturally a user understands what to do. From Idea to Design and the first CBL projects built my creative foundation. Sketching, storyboarding, quick prototyping, and ideation methods helped me explore multiple directions before narrowing down. They also taught me that unfinished sketches and prototypes can already be valuable if they move the design forward. Aesthetics of Interaction was a turning point. It shifted my attention from “what does it look like?” to “what does it invite people to do?” Design for Games & Play strengthened this by showing how feedback, attention, challenge, and learning shape an experience. These principles became useful in my FBP, where visual cues had to communicate spatial information quickly and clearly. In EMIT and Rewinder, I also saw how physical interaction can carry meaning. EMIT helped me design from a more instinctive interaction perspective, while Rewinder showed how mechanics, modularity, and user action can become part of aesthetic quality.

For my FBP, my PDP goal was to design the mapping between spatial information and feedback so that signals felt intuitive and reduced cognitive load. I also wanted to include modularity, because this connects to my vision of flexible, durable, and user-empowering technology. I explored how direction, distance, and urgency could be translated into visual, haptic, and audio feedback. This included radar-like overlays, edge cues, collision beams, vibration location, vibration intensity, pulsing, stereo panning, pitch, rhythm, and volume. Visual feedback could be precise, but distracting. Haptic feedback could feel natural, but uncomfortable. Audio feedback could work as an alert, but become annoying or confusing. This made me more critical about clarity. Some concepts looked good in sketches but were less suitable in context. Radar feedback was understandable, but expert feedback showed it could distract from the FPV view. Edge cues were subtle, but could be missed during fast movement. This pushed me toward clearer beam-like feedback that connects better to the pilot's field of view. Overall, I developed from designing appearance toward designing interaction quality. A next step that is also connected to User & Society is testing what shapes and forms can reduce cognitive load and long-term experience more deeply, especially visual distraction, and comfort.

User & Society keeps my own assumptions in check. I often have strong ideas about how something should work, especially when the topic is technical. This area reminds me that a design only becomes meaningful when it connects to how people actually experience, understand, and use it. Human-Centered Design first made this clear. Before that, I often trusted my own logic too much: if a design made sense to me, I assumed it would also make sense to others. Through interviews, observations, user journeys, and small user studies, I learned that people may interpret signals differently, use products unexpectedly, or value different things than I expect. CBL projects helped me apply this in open design contexts by involving users earlier, not only at the end. Design <> Research made this more critical by showing that a prototype can be used to ask a question, and that user input should connect to what I want to learn. Design Innovation Methods added stakeholder thinking, while Intercultural Design made me more aware of cultural context, norms, and assumptions. Sustainability & Design broadened this toward systems, circularity, and responsibility. Together, these courses helped me see User & Society as more than usability. It is also about context, ethics, values, and broader consequences.

For my FBP, my PDP goal was to conduct approximately 15 structured user tests to evaluate how visual, auditory, and haptic feedback influence spatial awareness in dynamic FPV scenarios. Before the main test, I also wanted smaller feedback moments to improve the designs. I tackled this by involving FPV pilots early and later testing the systems with 15 participants. The expert interviews worked as professional advice, while the benchmark helped me compare interpretation and performance in a more controlled way. My FPV experience helped me understand the context, but also created a risk of designing too much from my own perspective. Expert feedback challenged my early ideas: radar-like visual feedback could distract, audio was clearer for left and right than front and back, and haptic feedback felt promising but depended strongly on comfort and contact quality. These insights directly changed the design direction. The benchmark showed that visual feedback was often easiest to understand and performed strongest overall. Haptic feedback felt natural and hard to miss for many participants, while audio was least preferred because of confusion and annoyance. This taught me to separate performance, preference, comfort, and learning curve. Overall, I improved because user involvement changed my design decisions at different moments in the process. A next step is testing with experienced FPV pilots in more realistic flying scenarios and over longer durations.

For me, Business & Entrepreneurship is about understanding the step from an interesting idea to something that can create value in a real context. Earlier in my bachelor, I often looked at a prototype mainly from the perspective of whether it worked or whether people liked it. Over time, I learned that a design also needs a clear position: who is it for, why would it matter, how does it differ from what already exists, and what would be needed to take it further? Introduction to Business Design introduced me to this way of thinking. It helped me understand that a design concept is not only judged by its final form, but also by its value proposition, target group, stakeholders, and feasibility. Later, Design Innovation Methods made this more concrete. Methods such as service blueprinting, future thinking, stakeholder mapping, SWOT analysis, and value proposition development helped me see that design decisions are connected to a larger system around the product. I learned to look at desirability, feasibility, and viability together instead of treating them as separate concerns. Sustainability & Design added another layer to this. It made me think more about long-term value, circularity, repairability, and responsibility. This connected strongly to my Rewinder project, where I explored a modular and repairable multitool. Rewinder showed me that modularity can be more than a technical feature. It can become part of the product value, because it allows people to understand, repair, adapt, and keep using a product for longer. For my FBP, my PDP goal for this project was to perform market research to make well found strategic design decisions early on. I might have some experience and knowledge myself about FPV drone operation, but I might be oblivious about industry solutions that already are on the market to help tackle spatial awareness. I tackled this by positioning popular drone types that are on the market in relation to existing drone safety systems and operator control. Many drones solve spatial awareness problems through obstacle sensing and automatic avoidance. I deliberately chose a different direction: a feedback system that informs the pilot without taking over control. This helped me define the design more clearly. The system is not meant to replace pilot skill, but to increase awareness while preserving manual control. Also Overall, I improved in Business & Entrepreneurship because I moved from thinking “this could be a product” to thinking more critically beforehand about target group, differentiation, usability, and future development.

Math, Data & Computing is about using logic, data, and computational tools to support design decisions. For me, this area became more valuable when I started to use data not as a separate technical task, but as a way to compare design qualities and make my arguments more grounded.

Math, Data & Computing was not always my strongest or most natural area. In earlier projects, I often focused more on building a presentable prototype than on deeper data analysis. Courses such as Calculus, Physics for Engineers, Foundations of Data Analytics, Creative Programming, and Making Sense of Sensors helped me develop programming logic, sensor interpretation, data handling, basic statistics, data visualization, and working with measurable variables.

During my FBP, this became one of my biggest growth areas. In my PDP, I set the goal to define measurable indicators such as reaction time, directional accuracy, and error values. I applied this by turning the project into a benchmark between visual, haptic, and audio feedback. I measured reaction time to see how quickly participants responded to each modality, and I used perceived path accuracy with RMSE analysis to compare how well participants understood movement around them.

This changed the quality of my design decisions. The interviews and feedback showed how people experienced the modalities, but the data showed differences that were not always visible from preference alone. For example, several participants experienced haptic feedback as natural, but the benchmark results showed a stronger performance for visual feedback.

This taught me that data can challenge assumptions and make a design argument stronger, as long as it is interpreted together with qualitative feedback and prototype limitations.

My FBP used a Research-through-Design approach, supported by the Double Diamond. This fitted the project because it gave space for exploration, iteration, and reflection, while still structuring the process toward a clear outcome. By prototyping and testing different feedback modalities, I learned through making instead of only from theory. Each iteration created insights into interaction, technical feasibility, and user interpretation. The Double Diamond helped me stay open enough to explore, but structured enough to keep overview and finish my PDP goals. Through this, I developed communicative, adaptive, prototyping, and analytical skills. I became better at explaining design choices, responding to feedback, and using prototypes as part of research. A point for improvement is defining evaluation criteria earlier, so future projects connect exploration and testing more directly.

After my bachelor, I want to continue exploring the intersection of drone technology, human interaction, and operator control. My FBP made this direction clearer: I became less interested in systems that take over, and more interested in systems that help people stay aware, skilled, and in control.
I still want to pursue a master at TU/e, most likely within Industrial Design, but I do not want to rush into it directly. This year has been intense, so I plan to start in the second semester next year, while staying open to taking a full year if needed. Before continuing, I want to get my driver's license, create some distance from university, and explore what exists outside the academic environment.
I also want to investigate whether my FBP could develop beyond a research prototype. After Demoday and user testing, I received interest in the idea as a possible business direction. A next step would be testing a combined system with visual feedback for precise direction and short haptic feedback for urgency in a more realistic FPV setting. I want to keep designing technology that supports awareness, skill, and control instead of replacing them.