Leonie Vaccaro
About me
Professional Identity
I am passionate about art, I like to make art and I get inspired by it. I also love art history, as it describes different styles and philosophies as era’s throught history that can be seen as reactions to one an another. This thinking can also be applied to today’s societal trends. To contrast my love of art is my love of science or research. As I am fascinated by research and data. I love to analyze and find connections and pattern in data. Art is about making a statement about the current society and research is about creating an understanding about a certain topic. Which is why I find design so fun as it combines the two, but it also takes a more proactive stance. As design can be used to envision and discuss the possible future.
I really respect nurse and firefighters as they provide essential servers to society. And I hope to in some way contribute to society with my designs. I as designer value inclusion, which is why I find it important that a design is flexible and useable for many types of people in different situations. However too include all in one design is nearly impossible. From an earlier age I have noticed that different cultures have different values, traditions and rituals. As I have immigrant parents and one grandfather who also immigrated. Meaning that I am part of tree cultures with quite different mind sets. Because my grandfather also immigrated there is quite a difference between the family on my mother’s side and the family on my father’s side, even though they are living in the same country. I also believe that the user should be able to make their own decisions about how and if they what to use a design.
I love to work in teams as I noticed that I work best within a team. With a team of people you can look at problems from different angles and combine different ideas. But it also gives you help, external motivation and a way to check work and ambitions. Which is why working in a team pushes me to overcome my weaknesses. I am determined and will see things through until the end, however sometimes I need someone else to say stop. I also have simply put limitations that others don’t have as I am dyslexic. Which means that I always appreciated when a human checks my writing for errors.
Vision
At the moment the world is more and more interconnected and digitalized than ever. These recent changes are improving the world, for example researchers are now able to predict the structure of proteins using AI [1]. Which means that new advancements in medicine can be made. In general sorting data and accessing it has become easier due to the internet and the digitalization of information. However this also has its drawbacks as everything is depended on one another and feels the same. The user has acess to infinite information and data, but how can they pay attention to it when everything wants their attention. People’s work, private lives, money and medical data are all digitalized and on one device, their phone. We are now depended on our phones, the internet and energy than ever before.
Every (new) technollgy has its positives, but also its negatives. I think that designers have the responsibility to question society and even ourselves, on how we should use technollgy. Designers have the tools to look at the interaction between people, their environment and technollgy. Meaning they are able to look at the bigger picture and better question how technollgy could be used. I think the focus should be on what values are important to the designer and society and not just what a technology can do. This way the use of technology gets (re)designed to better suit the user and or society’s needs. Additionally, I believe that technollgy should not just exist in the digital world but also have a presents in the physical world. Which is again something a designer can facilitate.
[1] Bo Ni, David Kaplan and Markus Buehler. 2023. Generative design of de novo proteins based on secondary-structure constraints using an attention-based diffusion model. Chem 9, (July 13, 2023), 1828–1849. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chempr.2023.03.02