Magdalena Breitinger
PRODUCT DESIGNER
MASTER SHOWCASE
As part of my Final Master Project I developed a Showcase including all my projects during this time and a detailed description of these projects and me as a designer.
MY BACKGROUND
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My journey as a designer started with an internship in a Product Design studio in Milan in 2012.
It was my first touching point with design and laid the base for my approach to design in general. It helped me to prepare my portfolio, which lead me to my Bachelor’s course in Product Design at Central Saint Martins College in London, starting in autumn 2013.
During my three years of studying at this University I took part in many different projects, some of which included clients of different backgrounds.
After having finished the program in the summer of 2016, I decided to take some time off and find out where I want to go next. First, I traveled to Madagascar to volunteer as a teacher, which is where I also decided to continue my education in a Master’s program. This trip was then followed by another internship in the area of product design in Germany from February to August 2017. These experiences did not only teach me necessary skills but also strengthened my approach to design and taught me much about what skills were necessary in this profession. As a result, I wanted to use my Master to get a new view of design and gather more skills on the technical field as an addition to the knowledge I gained during my previous experiences. This decision brought me to Eindhoven where I started my Master in Industrial Design in autumn 2017.
PROFEsSIONAL IDENTITY
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As a designer, my main intention is to improve peoples’ everyday lives with my work. As a result, I am trying to choose projects that are meaningful and can have a positive impact on the user, such as my initial design project around the topic of dementia. I work in a very structured way and all decisions I take have a meaning and thought behind it. This, on one hand enables me to plan well and deliver my work on time, but can also keep me from letting go of my pre-set ideas and change my directions. During the program and by working on my own projects, this side of me was challenged and I became able to adjust to a change of circumstances. This development improved my design process and keeps it open to new input and ideas. Especially the feedback available from professionals with different backgrounds gave me the opportunity to look at my projects from a different perspective, which helps me to become a better designer.
My previous education concentrated on an aesthetic approach to design and equipped me with skills and tools to tackle this side of design.
During my bachelor, user-centered design, branding and research played an important role, in my Master’s program I wanted to add more technical knowledge to this.
Over the course of this Master’s program, I therefore tried to involve technology in all my projects and had the chance to get insights into new areas of design, including programming and electronics.
Especially the focus on innovation at TU/e made me increasingly interested in new technologies and how to transform Industrial Design into a more visionary profession that helps to make these technologies accessible to everyone.
It helped me to grasp the importance of pushing design into new directions which I am hoping to be part of.
This experience also illustrated the importance of involving the user into the equation and make technology assessable through user experience.
As a result, my wish is to design products that are tangible and real and at the same time explore innovation and how it can be included into everyday life.
In my designs, I am connecting user experience with innovation to make it available to everyone.
MY VISION
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We are designing the future and the products we design today can change peoples’ everyday life tomorrow.
Design can act as the bridge between technology and alter peoples’ behavior and lifestyle.
We as designers have the responsibility to use this tool in the best way in order to solve current issues, one of the most urgent being sustainability. Sustainability has always been an important factor for me, but since I arrived in Eindhoven, I have broadened my horizon on how it can be achieved. Now I am not only thinking about what materials to use but also what technology can do.
New technological developments can help to safe resources and make processes more efficient.
By making them accessible to everyone, designers have the ability to implement sustainability into society on a deeper level. Intelligent products are a good example to prevent wasting energy, artificial intelligence could be a solution to societal issues or the use of new materials can make single-use products less problematic for the environment.
My goal as a designer is to be part of this change and help improving our future through innovation.
During my Bachelor, I already acquired knowledge about user-experience and aesthetics, which I wanted to add new areas to in order to be able to understand and take part in new developments in technology. I did this in both electives and design projects in which I gained insights in programming, electronics and artificial intelligence. In the future, I want to use this knowledge in my projects to keep being part of innovation.
During my time at the University of Technology Eindhoven I took part in six electives and two projects apart from the Final Master Project.
