I'm Diede, an EngD candidate in Human-Systems Interaction at TU/e and an industrial designer with a deep interest in the relationship between technology and society. My work sits at the intersection of design research and creative technology as I build novel concepts, prototypes, and experiences that bring abstract futures into reality. But I also use design as a tool to gain a better understanding of the design context by utilizing Research-Through-Design methods.

My specialisation is in UX research: understanding how people actually live with technology, how it impacts them, and how we can use technologies to support their values. That research feeds directly into design as I research how people interact and reflect on my provocations and probes, iteratively refining these into prototypes tested with real people in real contexts.

The domains that I primarily work within are privacy-by-design, slow technology, and sustainability. Not as buzzwords, but as the values that shape my decision-making. I've been formally trained with the KEMs, design methods for profesionals which allow me to dissect and contribute to complex societal challenges and deal with ambiguous situations.

We are dependent on big tech companies. Day in day out we are using services by Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon. While we have to use their services to live our comfortable western lifestyle, they have perfected creating intricate digital profiles which are sold to the highest bidder. These profiles are so detailed, that these companies can almost assure their clients they can nudge your behavior, Influence what you buy or determine an entire election. And we don't seem to have a choice.

In my project Claude, I aim to reshape the future of the home server by adapting it to suit the decentralized internet, but this time putting privacy at center. This is done by drawing inspiration from the self-hosting community, a community of people that have been developing and hosting alternatives to big tech companies. Claude creates personal little clouds that can be hosted at home. Giving back control into the hands of the people who want to preserve their digital privacy through data-sovereignty.

Through an autoetnographic approach combined with expert interviews and a co-creation session I created a homeserver concept which put the users privacy first. It does this through a more personal approach to selfhosting architecture, which does not require personal services to be opened to the public web. This Architecture was then validated in another round of expert interviews. In the end I deliverd a well-rounded homeserver concept. The concept consists of two elements, the Claude portal; a home server and the Claude wallet; a key wallet to manage access to your or your friends' their servers. The whole project concept was then presented on the Nextcloud community days on invitation of Nextcloud.

I believe design has more power than we realize. In a society that defines success by profitability rather than impact, practices like surveillance capitalism have emerged, and human-centered values like safety, privacy, and happiness have been pushed aside. I believe designers could take a stance against this growth and efficiency centered approach by going the extra mile and design with the public good in mind.

An example of which can be found in designing around the internet. I believe the smart home itself resides in the users house, and not on an external cloud. This is because data protection often seems to be an afterthought in design, and sometimes even a business model. Humans have turned into products of the attention economy and Data sovereignty has become more important than ever. But to act on this, we might have to rethink our digital infrastructure. Not only do I advocate for a decentralized internet where our digital lives are not ruled by a handful of companies, but also the involvement of practices like Privacy-by-Design, which urges designers to take care of privacy throughout the entire design process. As practices like these can help us design for the public good.

But the bigger idea is this: what if we applied that same logic to other contexts? Sustainable-by-design. Equal-by-design. As designers, we should be innovating from social values like privacy, sustainability, and equality rather than innovating for the sake of technology or growth.