Welcome to my portfolio

Jurrien Brondijk

Industrial Design | Interactive Education

ABOUT ME

interactive Education, Games and Zoos!

Who am I?

My name is Jurrien Brondijk, I graduated from my master Industrial Design back in 2022. I love creating immsersive, interactive learning experiences. I like to think about how my design contributes to the broader experience of the ecosystem it is placed in. I care for every detail, no matter how small, that might benefit the end user experience. I draw a lot of inspiration from the videogames I enjoy. As a player, I’m often blown away by little details developers add to make their worlds feel alive. I love putting that level of care into my designs as well.

I have been practicing design ever since I started high school. There, I followed a track called technasium, in which I did a number design projects similar to those I would later do studying industrial design. This was my main motivation for going starting this study, and to persue design going forward.

Over the course of my studies, I developed not only my skills as a designer, but more importantly, I found my passion for creating interactive educational experiences. I saw how my interests and hobbies could be combined with what I am doing professionally, when during my bachelor I combined my interest in gaming with my studies by designing educational videogames. And again during my masters, where I took a new found interest in zoos, and combined it with my studies by working on zoo education together with Safaripark Beekse Bergen.

I want to continue to work on the kind of projects where I can let my passion shine through in my work.

Me in my natural habitat: safaripark Beekse Bergen!

Skills

I am very capable of translating my designs into a fully experiential prototype, giving potential users something tangible to give feedback on. Over the past years, I’ve created several educational VR, AR and PC games. Each in-depth experiences featuring fully-fledged environments, intuitive controls, animated characters, visuals, sound, gameplay elements, and learning goals.

I enjoy learning new skills I need when developing prototypes. I’m a quick and eager learner, picking up many skills over the past years, like programming in a variety of languages (HTML, Javascript, CSS, Angular, Java, C#, Unreal Engine), drawing, 3D modeling, animating and video editing.

Hobbies

In my free time I like to play videogames, either immersing myself in another world or playing a game that allows me to express my creativity. Over the past few years the game I've been drawn to for the latter has been Planet Zoo, a game in which players are able to create their own zoos, with incredible degrees of freedom.

I've been usign the game to create a scale model of a real zoo, Safaripark Beekse Bergen, but I also make my own zoos and try to learn as much about zoo design as I can. I find this a lot of fun, and I love to go outside and visit real zoos to take inspiration from. I make YouTube videos about both my own virtual zoos, as well as the real life zoos I visit in the hope to inspire other players.

PROJECTS

Projects I've worked on:

Augmented Reality for Zoo Education (Master graduation project)

In collaboration with Safaripark Beekse Bergen, I designed 5 educative augmented reality experiences zoo guests could play on their phone while visiting the park.

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Project Demos (EN) Project Demos (NL)

Virtual Reality Language Learning

My first project in the ream of educational experiences. My team and I designed a virtual reality experience, in which players were immersed in a french story. Through contextual cues they would learn the meaning of certain words.

Enversed Internship - VR Fire Safety Training

After the VR language learning project, I wanted to further develop my programming skills. I interned at Enversed Studios, a company making a variety of virtual reality experiences, for both education as well as entertaiment. One of the main projects I worked on was a VR fire safaty training tool.

My Classroom Pet - VR Empathy Training

This was the graduation project of my bachelor. I designed a virtual reality experience in which the player had to care for a virtual pet. The pet would display certain emotions based on how it was treated. The goal was for kids to train their emotion recognition skills.

Augmented Reality Language Learning

In this design project I helped design an augmented reality game that introduced kids to the English language in a playful way. They could use word cards to complete sentences which would then be played out in AR.

The "Illusion of Non-Linearity" (research project)

In this research I tried combining the freedom of a non-linear game with the benifits of a linear one, to see if this had an effect on players' enjoyment of the game.

Hobby: Planet Zoo

Planet Zoo is a videogame in which players can create their own Zoos. I have started to use this game to make a scale model of my favorite zoo, Safaripark Beekse Bergen, in great detail. I also use the game to design my own zoos, and make videos about it on YouTube.