philips design

During my bachelor I conducted an internship at Philips Design, on the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven. I decided to do an internship because I wanted to experience what it feels like to be an Industrial Designer outside of university. I wanted to see what kind of challenges you would face in the ‘real world’ and how working for a big company with budgets, multiple stakeholders with different interests and hard deadlines is like. During my time at Philips Design I worked on several projects, but my main project was 'Taking Care of Yourself'. Within this project, we used data to create an ecosystem of personal health solutions provided by Philips. The goal was to build one app in which a collection of Philips’ personal care devices could be used, rather than using individual apps for every device. We designed and tested that system, following a data-enabled design approach. This approach formed the common thread between all my projects. An important element of data-enabled design is that you continue designing while the prototype is with its users. So no static design but an ongoing design process with a system that is open to changes (Kollenburg & Bogers, 2019). To be able to do this we used the Wizard of Oz setup. In this approach, we (the ‘wizards’) simulated the behaviour of the app, so we could intervene and change things during the study.