Merijn Verhaak
Welcome to my portfolio website. Wordcount (3023)
Hello, my name is Merijn Verhaak. I was born in The Netherlands. I am a 3rd year student Industrial Design at the TU/e.
“I’m odds and ends
But I’ll be stumbling away
Slowly learning life is okay”
– a-ha, Take on Me
Vision
Mental wellbeing finds itself in the littlest of things, a morning walk, freshly brewed coffee, meditation and so many other things. My generation faces a mental health crisis due to a variety of factors (Cashin, 2024).
While visiting New York, I went to Central Park which was a remarkable experience. There were no cars, and it has become an area of peace and leisure in the middle of the loudest cities in the world. Everyone should be able to have their own “Central Park in the middle of their NYC”.
To create wellbeing in society, I design on two scales of design: Social and Interaction design. Interaction design can be seen as creating peace and leisure on a personal scale, Social design structures this peace on a collective scale.
I view technology as the tool to build these moments of peace. While currently rife with dark patterns that hijack attention. Design is being used to manipulate or invoke the emotions of users and by large society. My vision is to design technology around calm computing or public spaces that optimize health for the public.
Professional Identity
I am naturally a playful thinker; my ideas form around what would be funny or exciting to do. I dislike boring ideas where I can’t challenge myself enough. I take the initiative and allow my group members to also engage and break the dullness. I find fulfillment in challenging myself and seeing the tangible value of my work.
I consider myself to be a generalist fueled by curiosity and can find something interesting in any expertise area, and it’s an archetype that I keep striving to guide my growth as a designer. It helps with understanding different perspectives in groups and also wanting to understand them.
I am a perfectionist which I have struggled with in the past, I shifted my mindset of wanting to be perfect, to seeing the beauty of imperfection and recognizing that to grow. There is a term for this in Japanese: Wabi-sabi or as an object form: Kintsugi. Like Kintsugi, I view my mistakes not as failures, but as an opportunity to grow and mend them together into something greater.
One particular hurdle, I aim to overcome social hesitation in approaching outside stakeholders by using my thirst for knowledge as the catalyst to reach out. It’s a lacking aspect of my toolbox currently. And my ranking of competence in EA’s would be T&R, MDC, U&S, B&E, C&A. But all are at a decent level in my mind throughout my studies.
Goal Setting
Goal setting is something that I do naturally whenever I start a course. Which means that making pdp’s is more difficult, since I don’t know what I’m going to do before starting. I use it to set my scope for the upcoming semester, but I am not too sad if I don’t end up making all of the goals. Because I will have completed a lot of smaller goals that weren’t written down or couldn’t have known before starting.
Updating my PDP more often would help solve this problem, and help on the reflecting part. For the upcoming semester I have already set some goals which can be read in the future section. However, they aren’t necessarily SMART due to me not having confirmation about my squad for my FBP.
Inspiration
Fairphone
Fairphone makes modular smartphones using ethically sourced materials. The modularity with these phones is great, having tested one for the MOBIFREE project. Waag Futurelab (2023)
They do compromise a lot to fullfill their vision, the product itself is uncompetitive in terms of performance and quality.
Open Source Initiative
As someone who has been working with computers for the past 6 years. I have used open source software a lot.
I share their morals of sharing knowledge and an open flow of information. Everyone is offered a chance to learn and grow. I
Teenage Engineering
Their design language, is clearly inspired by Dieter Rams. However, they fix one of my main criticisms of his style. Dieter’s designs often become too minimalistic that it could do with a little more details.
Teenage Engineering adds those details and creates a style that I love, it’s a clean style of cassette futurism, which I want to combine with pastel colours in my designs.
Jony Ive
The lead designer behind the iPod, what I particularly like about his work, is interaction design. For example, the sliding rotating wheel on the iPod with little haptics.
Although my criticisms of Dieter Rams’ designs are present in the iPod, which is an overly minimalistic design.
Which has continued into the modern-day smartphone, a piece of glass with no room for creativity allowed.
Contact
E-Mail: contact@mverhaak.nl
Linkedin: Merijn Verhaak
Photographer Instagram: collinshootz7