HI THERE, NICE TO MEET YOU!
My name is Alexander Frissen and this is my bachelor's portfolio
“Designing more embodies interactions”
As a designer I envision a future in which technology no longer flattens everyday experience into screens, menus, and notifications, but instead becomes a calm, embodied extension of how we already move, feel, and act in the world. Today, an increasing share of our lives is mediated through screens: work, communication, entertainment, control of our homes, and even our social relationships. While this brings flexibility and efficiency, it also concentrates attention, increases distraction, and removes physical agency from many interactions.
This is especially visible in the home, the car, and everyday devices. Tasks that were once embodied—turning a knob, pulling a lever, adjusting a light—are now often reduced to tapping sliders on glass. This shift may be convenient, but it also erases tactility, muscle memory, and the emotional quality of interaction. For children growing up in this environment, for visually impaired users, and for anyone sensitive to distraction and screen dependence, this creates long-term consequences for how technology is experienced and trusted.
My vision is not anti-technology. It is anti-flattened technology. I believe that smart systems should feel alive but not loud: responsive to intention, expressive in use, and present only when needed. The best technologies, in my view, are those that disappear into the activity itself. When interaction feels magical, it is not because it is mysterious, but because it is so well integrated that the user focuses on the outcome, not the interface.
This is why I am drawn to embodied, spatial, and gesture-based interactions, to haptic and shape-changing interfaces, and to systems that respond to movement, force, and intention rather than to taps on glass. Whether it is controlling light with a hand movement, shaping sound through motion, or physically manipulating a control in a car, these interactions restore a sense of agency and connection between human and system.
As a designer, I see my role as someone who reshapes how people live with technology, not just how they operate it. I want to create new interaction paradigms that allow technology to be powerful without being overwhelming, expressive without being distracting, and advanced without being cold. This means working at the boundary between engineering and experience: bringing new sensing, actuation, and computation into products only when they enable a better, more human way of interacting.
Professionally, I aim to work in environments that allow this kind of exploration to become real: near-market product design, experimental concept development, or early-stage R&D in multidisciplinary teams. I want to collaborate with engineers, researchers, and designers to turn emerging technologies into interaction systems that feel right in everyday life. Whether in a design studio, a research lab, or an early-stage startup, my goal is to build prototypes and products that demonstrate how technology can enrich daily experience rather than dominate it.
In short, I design magical but grounded interactions: experiences where technology fades into the background, agency returns to the body, and everyday actions become richer, calmer, and more meaningful.
IDENTITY
Design by making
I am an interaction-driven system designer who starts from technology and builds outward toward meaningful human experience. I explore what emerging technologies can do, materialise them through prototypes, and then shape interactions that allow people to use those technologies in intuitive, embodied, and expressive ways. Rather than beginning with abstract user needs and translating them into interfaces, I work by discovering what is technically possible, building it into something tangible, and letting that reality reshape how interaction should feel.
This approach is visible in my gesture-based smart-home system, where I first developed a working gesture recogniser and only then defined how people could meaningfully interact with light and sound through it. The same pattern appears in my shape-changing automotive control (Twist Assist button) and in earlier interactive projects: I use making as a way to think, to reveal constraints, and to uncover new opportunities. Prototyping is not just a way to test ideas for me; it is how I generate them.
In teams, I typically take the role of conceptual driver and system integrator. I am usually the person who proposes a strong interaction vision and then stays involved as that vision becomes real, ensuring that technical decisions, hardware, software, and interaction design continue to support the intended experience. I do not enjoy being limited to surface aesthetics or isolated technical tasks; I want to work at the level where mechanics, electronics, software, and interaction come together into a coherent whole.
What ultimately guides my decisions is not whether a system is technically impressive, but whether it feels right. A technically weak system frustrates me, but a technically strong system with a weak experience bothers me more. I care deeply about how interaction feels in the body: how a movement, a touch, a sound, or a resistance maps to an outcome. This is why I am drawn to embodied interaction, haptics, and physical agency rather than flat, screen-based control.
My background in robotics competitions, hands-on electronics, and multidisciplinary engineering teams (such as Solar Team Eindhoven) shaped this identity. These experiences taught me to think in systems, to integrate disciplines, and to respect the reality of engineering constraints while still pushing for strong experiential outcomes. I am comfortable working across software, hardware, and form, and I actively seek out projects where those domains must be combined.
I do not see myself as a speculative or purely conceptual designer. I design through building: turning ideas into functioning artefacts so that they can be experienced, questioned, and improved. My goal is not to invent entirely new technologies, but to use existing and emerging technologies in ways that create richer, more human, and more embodied ways of interacting with the world.