Practitioner Podcast 2 - Cathelijne Bertels

In this second design practitioner podcast Mieke talks to Cathelijne Bertels, who is based in Amsterdam. Cathelijne originally studied at IDE in Delft before going on to work at Microsoft for 13 years, working as a user-experience designer at a time when UX design was just becoming a major part of large IT organisations. After working at Microsoft, Cathelijne established her own design agency and over the years has broadened her approach to design, embracing an ever wider range of design problems, and working with very different organisations. Most recently she has been working in the area of social innovation as a designer in government. Cathelijne describes the progress of her long career as a designer and discusses what she has learned (and continues to learn) along the way. She reflects on the iterative nature of design processes saying that designing “isn't just a double diamond, it’s a gazillion diamonds in a certain time frame pressed together”. But she also describes designing as a human process that can feel like magic: “that's just the magic of the creative process and in our brains, this stuff that we can't really figure out- this beautiful human side”. But she emphasises that for design to be effective, the scientific side of designing, including working with real experts, needs to be present.