Tell us a bit about yourself as a designer – what’s your background?
I initially studied Industrial Design Engineering in Spain, followed by a degree in Product Design. I then moved to the Netherlands to study for a Masters degree in Strategic Design in Delft. My dissertation on how to gain insights in unfamiliar contexts was with Philips Design, and in this case I explored the needs of consumers in India. When I graduated in 2005, I was lucky enough to be involved in an exciting start-up in San Francisco which received a grant from Microsoft. We supported the setting up of the peer-to-peer micro-financing project Kiva. It’s now very successful, but back then they were just six guys working in a garage. My role was to find out why there weren’t many entrepreneurs from Africa uploading their profiles. After undertaking context analysis and research in Uganda and Kenya we found that while there were lots of problems with reliable internet access and electricity, mobile phones were booming. We were able to develop a simple MMS mobile app that enabled entrepreneurs to upload a picture and blog post much more simply.

In 2006 I started working at Philips Design doing People Research. I started with projects in healthcare, and more recently in consumer lifestyle. I’m involved in lots of front-end innovation design projects and aim to strengthen our people-centric way of working when developing products and solutions.

What designers have influenced you the most?
When I started on Philips healthcare projects, I learned a lot from my colleague Lesh Parameswaran, who has now set up her own agency FuelFor. She was very articulate about how research can inform design, and I learned a lot about how to communicate the value of design, particularly to other experts, such as cardiologists. You need to have a good explanation of why these busy people should listen to you, and be able to be clear about why design is an instrumental factor in improving healthcare as a whole. Also within Philips, the Probes work has been a significant influence. The issues they cover and what they produce is incredibly inspirational. But I would say in Philips Design I have had the chance to work with some of the best designers in the world.

Which of your designs are you most proud of?
When working in research it’s hard to claim a design as your own. But I’m very proud of the work that I’ve done in healthcare – the amount of care that we took and how we executed the projects. I’m also particularly proud of the time I spent working with the Probes team (on the Food project) and on Menu Menu and the way we did it. This was a very authentic project, we were completely immersed in it. A lot of passion went into it, and I think it paid back for me.

The Menu Menu project was an innovative new method of research for Philips Design – what did you learn most from it?
If you’re researching a new area and want to engage with the situation and the people, you have to be very involved. If you want to be able to develop the right solutions I believe you have to live and breathe it and really get your hands dirty. The method of research we used for Menu Menu aimed to trigger more inspirational insights, and to co-create with people, developing ideas together.

We are now rolling this out across other domains within Philips. We can always learn more about how people use our products. It can sound a bit abstract, but really it’s very simple – if you want to be a leader in a field, you need to be obsessed with it.

What do you enjoy most about your work?
You learn so much with every new topic, it’s like being a child every time. Most importantly, I love to see findings from our research being understood by others in the business, and then becoming part of the language in design and marketing. When it spreads, you know it’s working – and that’s great.

10 January 2012