Ever since I was young, I’ve been telling visual stories through my drawings. As I grew older, I became more curious about the world around me and absorbed as much information as possible. After school, my grandparents took me to zoos, museums and into nature. My drawings became a way to tell people about all the things I saw and learned. That curiosity still drives my work today. Visually, I’m drawn to styles that combine knowledge, imagination and world-building, from old scientific illustrations and speculative design to Utopian Scholastic aesthetics.

My Moluccan heritage is a major source of inspiration. I combine it with new technologies such as AI, creative coding and 3D animation to create futurist works that explore culture, memory and possible futures while questioning colonial ways of seeing. At the same time, I increasingly return to working with my hands. Drawing, scanning, collecting, making and experimenting with physical materials often come before the screen. Technology is not the starting point. It is another tool for extending an idea.

Besides pushing my laptop to its limits, I enjoy reading about history and psychology, spending time in museums and nature, and listening to old-school hip-hop. I’m fascinated by how the human brain works, how people make meaning and how images can influence the way we understand the world. I try to bring that curiosity into everything I design.

After graduating from Communication and Multimedia Design, I started my master’s in Data Driven Design, which kickstarted my interest in AI and the ethics surrounding it. During my extracurricular projects, I worked on the X=festival team, took a UX course in Tokyo and helped create the HU Green Office.

I’m ashamed to say that my first UX design job had me making screens for Shell and large insurance companies. In my free time, I went to rallies for social and climate justice, yet every Monday I went back to the office to create extra value for some of the same systems I was protesting against. It took me some time to fully figure out what kind of designer I wanted to be.

The answer turned out to be simple: I want to use what I make to help create a better world. Sometimes that means making art. Sometimes it means questioning the technology we use and the systems behind it. And sometimes it means teaching a new generation of designers to do the same, as I now do at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.

I see myself first and foremost as a visual storyteller, always trying to find the relevant story at the right moment. For me, designing is a form of storytelling, but it is also a form of wayfinding.

My ancestors crossed the seas by reading the stars, the currents and the world around them. I like to think about design in a similar way. Not as a fixed map with one predetermined destination, but as a way of reading signs, finding orientation and navigating toward possible futures. The tools have changed, but the question remains much the same: where are we, and which direction do we choose from here?