About me
I am Britt (full name Brigitte), a 24-year-old Dutch living in Eindhoven. At the moment, I am in the second year of my master in Industrial Design. I am an ex-top handball athlete, a survivor of chronic Lyme disease, a down-to-earth villager and a creative Industrial Designer who likes to contribute to a more sustainable world. My main interests lie in Constructive Design Research and UX research with a focus on human-data interactions in relation to sustainable and healthy lifestyles. In my spare time, I like to spend my time on creative projects, mountain biking, cycling, hiking, travelling and cooking.

Vision
With my designs I strive to create a bridge between the hard-to-grasp topic of climate change and the everyday actions of individuals. As individuals, we all have the power to contribute to a more sustainable world. By supporting sustainable and healthy lifestyles, we can not only improve our own well-being and prevent lifestyle related diseases, but also indirectly benefit the environment and society as a whole. However, achieving this requires both individual and societal change, and can be difficult without the right tools and support.
As designers, we have the skills and expertise to help facilitate this change. By using technology and design, I hope to make this complex issue more relatable and actionable for people, and to help them understand the impact of their behavior on the environment so they can make more informed and sustainable choices. This might involve using novel and engaging ways to communicate data, such as through data sculptures. I feel that physical data sculptures are powerful tools for communicating complex information in an engaging, meaningful and accessible way and also allows for shared reflection. However, at the moment, digital communication channels may be more accessible and familiar for many people. Aibel is a digital project example that shows how air quality data was used in a digital housing platform to be able to make well informed choices about healthy living environments. Nonetheless, I believe it is important that data sculptures become more integrated into households because of the potential benefits they can offer, especially with the rise of behavior trackers in the form of data. Also the trend of Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows for more accessible self-monitoring on individual behaviours which also generates opportunities for lifestyle awareness in the household.
The household context is a good starting point for promoting sustainable and healthy lifestyles, as it is the place where people reflect on and often make decisions about their own behavior and consumption. By focusing on this context, I aim to create more sustainable and healthy habits and routines, and encourage people to make more conscious choices. Ecorbis is a projects that encompass my vision well, as it makes climate change more graspable and personally relevant in the form of a data sculpture.
Of course, individual action alone is not enough to create a more sustainable world. Systemic change is also necessary, such as supermarkets offering affordable sustainable food options and governments implementing policies to encourage sustainable practices. But by increasing knowledge and competence, individuals can play a key role in driving this change.



SDGs. Images retrieved from: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/news/communications-material/

Passion for Experience Prototyping

Inspired by people & surroundings

Human-Data Interaction

Innovative: Technology Integration

Visual Communication
Identity
As a design researcher, I believe that an exploratory and participatory approach is especially useful when designing for sustainable and healthy lifestyles. This approach in combination with my open-minded and curious attitude enables me to consider the needs and perspectives of various actors and understand how to design for a specific context, such as the home. My empathetic and accessible nature helps me to make people feel comfortable and understand needs from different perspectives through conversations. I experience that my creativity is especially sparked through these conversations but also by observing real-world situations, rather than just sitting at my desk. In the end, I feel that I have the skills to scope my projects on complex topics based on insights from literature and the exploratory and participatory process.
Through my investigative attitude and a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods in my design and research process, I want to contribute to the academic world so insights can be used and applied by other designers. I am a person that likes to help others and I also want to transfer enthusiasm to the people around me. One of the pitfalls here is that I sometimes put the pleasure of others ahead of myself. Because of my experience as a top athlete and as a Lyme patient, I want to enjoy everything I do and, therefore, I feel most at ease when people are passionate but also value fun in their work. Within teams, I often have an assertive and proactive attitude and I want to keep an overview of the design process to make well-informed choices but also to work in an efficient manner.
What drives me as a designer is the versatility of design and research challenges related to sustainable and healthy lifestyles and physicalizing data. To explore human-data interactions, I consciously implement a phase of experience prototyping to get insights while having a hands-on approach which is something I really enjoy. In this, I feel that critically evaluating designs from a first- and second-person perspective is one of my strengths, which in combination with literature enables me to make well-grounded choices. My down-to-earth personality also ensures that I keep seeing things realistically. Nevertheless, I always try to find new, yet accessible ways to communicate information to people and in the same time improve my professional skills.

Name: Britt Stegers
Background: BSc Industrial Design TU/e
Track: Research, Design & Development (RDD)
Certificate Program:
- Technology for Sustainable Development
- User & Society
- Technology & Realization
- Design & Research Processes