Reimer Rigtering

Design

Designing is easy, everyone can do it. But designing something well is hard, really hard, actually. This is for me the most important lesson I learned as a designer. It describes the beauty of design for me. Everyone can design. It is something that binds us as people, no matter where you’re from, no matter which language you speak, we all design. It is a connection between all of us.

But designing well is challenging. It requires creativity, the ability to look at things from a point of view you have never considered yourself and maybe the hardest of all, it requires you to fail, a lot. This is why I think design is best done together. Designing together already helps against pitfalls like being stuck in one perspective or not realizing an idea could be better if you would change it somehow. Generating ideas together will always, always result in a better end product. And this is also what makes design so enjoyable, talking to each other, figuring out what someone means, drawing some quick sketches on a bit of paper lying around. And then, finally, creating something together.

Church Youth Group Space Design

To create opportunities to connect and stay connected, I wanted to create a new social gathering space by transforming a room in a church located in the Heemskerk city center.

I designed a social gathering space for teenagers to meet on Sunday evenings so they can meet up and play games. This is a space created to give teenagers a meeting place and is open to everybody. The idea is to stimulate contact between these teenagers and take them outside their own daily bubble. This is all to combat loneliness, provide new perspectives, and offer teenagers a sense of community with people around their own age. This way, they have opportunities to help and support each other.

This space started as a messy upstairs area of a church in the city center of Heemskerk. Over a period of about 3 months, I designed and built, with the help of some friends, the entire space. First sketching, then over to 3D-moddeling for the bar itself. Creating plans for different possible layouts and talking with many different people about budget, possibilities and how the space could be used outside the youth group as well. And ultimately building everything to realize all the plans.

Form and Senses Art Project

To stimulate different senses in new ways, my team and I wanted to approach the senses in new and creative ways. We wanted to do this by creating an artwork which targeted the senses in interesting ways.

We created this artwork for an exibition within the TU Delft library where it was displayed. The artwork was created focusing on touch, sight, and hearing. Starting by making it possible to touch the artwork everywhere. Feel the interesting shapes and textures throughout the artwork. Then the main part of the artwork consisted of "invisible strings." Using sensors to detect hand movement within the artwork, you could play these strings and different hand positions would correspond to different sounds and lights.

The lights created new perspectives and lit up different parts of the brightly colored artwork. Next to that, you could even combine sounds and lights by playing multiple strings simultaneously.

Rover Design and 3D-modeling

To learn VR-sketching, my team wanted to make a finalized project by creating a hypothetical Mars rover and render our model using Blender.

We began by creating a full-scale frame to establish the basic shape. Then, through an extensive process, the frame was enclosed using sheets that connected all the ribs. We ensured that every component had double walls to avoid paper-thin surfaces and to provide an interior living space. We added all the necessary elements to make the rover suitable for multi-day missions in the future. Finally, the rover was rendered in Blender to produce high-quality visuals and present the concept in its final form.

Sketching, Drawing and Editing

Sketching, drawing, and editing are all import skills while designing. They are essential to create a good design and to communicate with others.

Sketching lays out a plan, using quick and easy visuals. It is the best way to communicate quickly and is absolutely crucial while brainstorming with a team of people to get your ideas across in the best possible way.

Drawing and Editing are the next steps. Sketches are nice, but they only take you so far. By drawing your ideas, they are presentable to clients. Being able to edit photos is an important step in finalizing your drawings. Often being needed to best transition your design into digital images for production posters and websites.

Coding

Making things is amazing. Well, coding is like building something, but with an infinite number of building blocks and opportunities right at your fingertips. So many people who have never met, but are collaborating over the internet and helping each other because of their passion for making something great.

The only real limit in coding is your imagination. Use every building block available and if you can't find the correct blocks? Create them yourself! Explore different languages with their own pros and cons and use your knowledge from one to improve the other and be even better for it.

Quantum English Art Project

The Quantum Poiesis project is a piece where I did the coding for an artist. It is the first step towards a quantum computer speaking Old English. It was displayed on an art exibition within the TU Delft library.

This piece runs a quantum computer simulation based on a quantum computer from QuTech. The data from these quantum bits are plotted on a sphere, which are then translated into letters. After linking the letters together into words, phonemes of these words are generated. These are then spoken aloud by the computer using a Text-to-Speech engine. To ensure this system runs continuously in an exhibition, it needed to be robust and capable of running indefinitely without human intervention.

This piece required a combination of different coding languages, I coded the backend in Python and was asked to do the frontend in Kotlin and OPENRNDR. So I learned Kotlin to make it possible, and although the communication between languages created its own challenges, it all worked out amazingly.

Pygame UI Library

I do a lot of coding just for fun for years now. And my go-to small project has always been small games. I used pygame for most of these games, but quickly ran into problems with UI elements being too complicated to quickly implement.

So I decided to create a library on top of pygame that would make it possible to create simple and easy-to-use UI elements. I created a library that would allow you to create buttons, sliders, text boxes, and more. I put a lot of effort into it to make it incredibly flexible and usable in many different contexts and usecases. And I still develop it to this day. And creating games using the library has made my coding experience for these small games infinitely more enjoyable.

Game Desing

Designing games is fun, I have made countless quick playable games or translated existing games to the computer screen. I've also built larger games twice, using Unity as the game engine to build the game within.

The two larger games I have made were both with other people, working in a team to create the best game we could in a tiny bit of time. Using C# for these games to build the scripts which run the game itself. I coded multiple things, but the largest thing I implemented into these group projects was a fully implemented inventory system. Including power-ups and tools for the player to use, yielding different effects and uses.

Infinite Poem Generation

This project was aimed at infinite generatable poem generation within its simpelest form. Using related words to create an infinitly varying chain of related words.

This was done with two main tools: A LLM API and a Vector database. It implemented a large vector database of words and used it together with the LLM alternating to create a varying chain. First, the LLM would yield a word followed by a related word set to a certain "distance" within the vector database. After that the LLM would yield a new word relating to the previous word. By alternating between these steps, the chain of words could be infinitely long.