Hey, my name is
Koos
Houben
Industrial Design student
Hi, my name is Koos Houben, I am a 20 years old, third year student at Industrial Design at TU/e. I am a highly motivated and team-oriented designer with a passion for creating experiences that bring people together, and invite people to enjoy. Within team environments, I balance open-mindedness with critical thinking and motivate the team to bring out the best. I am an active learner and active person, in my free time, I practice various sports and make electronic music. As an active learner, I embrace hands-on learning and spontaneous creativity, believing that every challenge is an opportunity for growth.
Professional identity
What motivates me as a designer is my fascination with how experiences shape emotion and social connection. I am driven by the process of translating these moments into engaging interactions through making and experimentation. Working with experiences such as events and festivals allows me to explore how shared moments can create lasting positive memories and meaningful connections.
I am an adventurous designer, crossing the borders of my comfort zone, to experience new innovations. I aim to learn new methods to design original and innovative concepts, creating entertaining experiences for others. I do this by paying attention to the circularity of materials, designing for reuse, efficiency integrating a sustainability value into my design practice in a practical manner. Although sustainability is no longer a central focus of my design vision, it remains an important consideration in how I approach materials, production, and long-term impact.
I apply an active approach to design, I prefer to work with my hands and learn through tangible interactions and experiences. My visual communication skills are stronger than my verbal communication skills and therefore I highly value the aesthetics of my projects, having a consistent style and aesthetically pleasing visual language is important for communicating and presenting concepts. Still I aim to develop my verbal presentation skills, by practicing to speak in front of others and by focusing on storytelling in presentations.
I am a real team player, a good listener and can give constructive feedback. I can balance a critical and open-minded attitude. My flexibility is what also makes me a team player, as I am able to organize a team but also able to take on a more executing role. Additionally, I prefer to take minutes to stay aware of the process and upcoming steps. I believe, atmosphere is the key value for a team to perform and maximize its potential, and I always strive to promote an optimistic attitude and motivate teammates to fanatically participate.
Vision
I position design as a primary driver in creating experiences, connections, and changing people’s emotions, but not as a primary driver to solve systematic problems. With a constantly adapting world, there are many complex systems like politics, wars and social problems that people can get stressed about. I believe I can use my tools and skills as designer to cope with this complexity of the world by offering moments of escape and social connection (Scheffran, 2025). Rather than aiming for systematic transformation, my work focuses on micro-transformations in emotional state, social openness, and presence (Shedroff, 2001; Rutherford, 2016). I am particularly inspired by festivals and music events as environments where design of music, lights shows and atmosphere harmonize. Where people voluntarily come together, share experiences, and temporarily step outside daily pressures. These experiences are not moments of escape, but they can act as catalysts, creating moments of intensity that linger through memory and influence future behaviour and perception (Kinunnen, 2020; Packer & Ballantyne, 2010).
Design’s agency lies in shaping how moments are felt, remembered and shared. Through the design of multisensory experiences, combining light, sound, movement, mechanical systems, and spatial interventions, I design atmospheres that entertain and make people more aware of the moment they are in, inviting people to slow down, engage with one another through shared moments of awareness and experience. I also aim to explore emergent technologies like Artificial Intelligence and interactive systems as a tool to enhance experiences.
REFERENCES
- Kinnunen, M., Homi, H., & Honkanen, A. (2020). Social Sustainability in Adolescents’ Music Event Attendance. Sustainability, 12(22), 9419. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12229419
- Packer, J., & Ballantyne, J. (2010). The impact of music festival attendance on young people’s psychological and social well-being. Psychology of Music, 39(2), 164–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735610372611
- Rutherford, D. (2016). Affect theory and the empirical. Annual Review of Anthropology, 45(1), 285–300. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102215-095843
- Scheffran, J. (2025). Planetary boundaries, polycrisis and politics in the anthropocene: climate pathways, tipping cascades and transition to sustainable peace in integrative geography. In The anthropocene: Politik – economics – society – science (pp. 339–444). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-71807-6_8
- Shedroff, N. (2001). Experience Design 1. Waite Group Press.