Five Questions is a monthly series profiling argodesign creatives, highlighting their influences and inspirations.
How do you Think by Making?
I’ll be honest, I also really enjoy reading and researching about a problem or topic first - there is so much knowledge out there and great things other people did that we can learn from and build upon. But I often already start sketching in my notebook while I’m researching, just to get thoughts out of my head and on paper. These sketches could be early drafts of actual interfaces or more abstract artifacts that help me understand and make things more graspable. Once getting into the actual interaction design, for me it’s crucial to visualize interfaces early, stress test them and then iterate. It allows me to see where concepts fail and can work on improving them. Figma is my friend here - copy, paste, adjust.
What’s one of the gnarliest design problems you’ve ever solved?
It might have actually been my master thesis, mainly because it was a very different way of designing. I was working on making 3D computer games accessible by removing mouse and keyboard input and replacing it with gaze-input only. The challenge of gaze-only interaction is allowing the user to explore and look around without accidentally triggering input. For example, when navigating through a 3D world they need to input where they want to go but at the same time not go everywhere they look. Solving that meant fine-tuning vectors and adjusting parameters in code to smooth the interaction. It was a lot of testing, trial and error to actually find something that was right and felt natural.
What’s your current obsession?
I’ve started doing pottery this year and it’s pretty addictive. It’s a good contrast to the digital design of my job, to create something with my hands. Throwing on the pottery wheel forces me to slow down. There is often no way back once I’ve messed up - a process of making I’ve learned to enjoy a lot.
If you could remove one word from the design dictionary, what would it be?
I’m not sure if I actually want to remove a word, but I sometimes have the feeling that we are using many words that everyone defines slightly differently. This often leads to confusion and misalignment especially when working with new people. For example, when working with design systems, I’ve had many discussions around the difference between a component, a building block, a pattern, and a template.
Who is your design hero? Why?
I admire people that push the design community forward in terms of more ethical and sustainable design. It’s always easier to only focus on your own users or business needs - but the products we design don’t live in a vacuum, so it’s important but also more difficult to consider all these other aspects as well, especially when looking at AI. I’m glad there are people that help with that by providing methods and resources to the community and advance the discussion and knowledge.
