About me
Recent work
Personal projects

About me

Hi, I'm Brendan Spijkerman, a recent TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering graduate and currently working at HomeWizard, a company that designs Home Automation products and services.

I design products. Both physical and digital ones and, if possible, a combination of the two. In my free time I try to expand my skills by dabbling in things like film & photography, animation and programming. When I’m not doing that, I’m probably road cycling or pushing around virtual photons, rendering photo-realistic images of the products I design.

I believe that products, however simple, should be functional and enrich people's lives. From the finish of the materials or the speed of an animation, right up to the clickiness of a button.

I could keep on talking, but seeing is believing. Check out my projects on this website and keep visiting regularly to see new ones.

Recent work

Phiton

A discus that captures throwing performance

Phiton

The world's first performance capturing discus

Origin

In discus throwing only one number matters: final distance. In the summer, the athlete and coach can immediately see and measure this performance figure. As the days get colder, training shifts to indoor facilities and athletes throw into a net suspended a few metres in front of them. Their intuitive performance measurement has been taken out of the equation. Phiton aims to give athletes back their final distance by analysing their throw and calculating a final distance based on numerous variables.

Physics model

Many factors affect the performance of a throw. Not only the athlete's performance, but also environmental factors such as wind speed and direction, the shape of the discus, air density, the list goes on. An interactive physics model was built to calculate the performance of a throw in any combination of conditions.

Technology

Phiton uses the same 3D tracking system as the HTC Vive virtual reality headset. A basestation emits a series of infrared pulses and laser sweeps. Twenty sensors in Phiton pick up on these signals through the infrared transparent polycarbonate cover plates.

Sensors

Phiton's sensors allow it to not only calculate its position to within 2,5 mm, but also obtain orientation data and do so 60 times per second, capturing the full raw-performance of an athlete.

2,5 mm

60 Hz

Orientation

Luminous language

A translucent LED ring on both sides of Phiton presents the user with an intuitive interface that shows the battery level and connection status.

App

Phiton comes with an easy-to-use app, allowing the coach to quickly see the performance of their athletes over time and immediately start a new training.

When connected to Phiton with Bluetooth, the app shows real-time telemetry about the discus. Automatic throw detection presents the coach with an overview of all throws of the training and highlights the best and most recent ones.

Flying Keys

Car sharing made easy

The digital design company UNITiD came to us with a request to explore the future of automotive transport and come up with a product that could be the first step towards this future vision. An extremely vast domain, especially for a company with almost no experience with physical design.

The future of transport

Based on numerous trend analyses, a future vision was formed. Transport is ubiquitous and has been transformed into a service model. City centers are filled with cars open for anyone to use. A continous availability of transport. Everyone can pick any type of car that best suits their needs at that moment. Need to move furniture? Take a station wagon. Just want to get to get some coffee with friends? Take a small car. This feeling of ultimate freedom of transport is often playfully described as the 'GTA feeling'. Pick any car you want, when you want. But in this case without harming people in the process.

Ubiquitous

A service

Flexible

Taking a step back

Now that we have a future vision, what is the first step we can take to reach that goal? A product that we can create today, that clearly aims for the future of mobility and lays a foundation on which to build this new way of transportation.

What is the first step?

If ubiquitous, shared transport is the future, then the first step towards that goal is sharing a car. A lot of families have a second car that is hardly used. Can we enable close friends and neighbours to easily share this car?

96%

of the time a second car is standing still

Introducing: The Flying Keys

The key that makes sharing a car easier than ever before.

Designed to blend in

The aesthetics of the Flying Key reflect the simplicity of its use. A robust, minimalistic and self-explanatory design.

You already know how to use it

The Flying Key works exactly the same way as a regular key. It will automatically track the time you are using the car, no need to push any other button except to flip open the key!

How it works

Every car key has a transponder in it. This transponder communicates with the car and, if they agree with each other, the car starts. The Flying Key selectively enables or disables the transponder, making sure your friends, family and neighbours can only start the car if they are allowed to use your car.

Ike

A social robot for hotel lobbies

Meet Ike!

Hotel lobbies can be quite dull and Ike is here to liven up the place. Being a curious robot, Ike continuously explores the environment he's in.

Concepts

An initial selection of three concepts was made. Each concept was based on a different kind of explorative behaviour: visual exploration, touch-based exploration and group-based exploration.

Because interactions take place over time, I used my skills in 3D animation and rendering to show each concept's behaviour. The vision-based concept was chosen to continue the project with and was later named Ike.

Movement

Ike is in essence an inverted pendulum, which means he constantly has to shift his balance to stay upright. This also gives him a more natural looking way of moving, leaning into the direction of movement.

Advanced concept

Ike is an advanced concept. This means Ike's design should be feasible. The main working principles were researched and determined to be feasible. This includes how Ike moves, charges, detects obstacles and processes data.

Seeing is believing

I decided to render Ike in an actual hotel lobby to really sell the idea behind ike; passive entertainment through continuous exploration.

Making this video involved 3D camera tracking, capturing the environment's lighting and, of course, animation.

A revolutionary training device

Coming soon

Due to confidentiality agreements I can't show this project yet. Trust me it's worth the wait!

Google Entrance

Shopping, reinvented

Google Entrance was designed for Royal Boon Edam, which wanted to shift its focus more towards the retail industry. Google Entrance takes Boon Edam and (fictionally) Google and moves both parties into physical retail. The result is a store that is unlike current retail stores.

A new shopping experience

Designed from the ground up to deliver a new kind of shopping experience. Google Entrance is almost completely transparent, giving an open appearance, inviting the customer to step inside

Surrounded by content

Once inside, the smart glass gradually blurs to give the customer a sense of privacy while still allowing light to come in.

Sensors detect the presence of the customer and, if the customer chose to opt-in, their smartphone. This enables Google Entrance to show previously viewed products and show product recommendations on the OLED display embedded in the glass. The blurred glass also ensures legibility of the display.

Tuned to you

Google Entrance also uses the customer's posture, facial expression, heart rate and the pitch of their voice to determine their mood and adjusts the light temperature accordingly. RGB LED strips in the steel frame light up the entire entrance

Patio House

A house that shields from the busy outside world

Patio House

Patio House was designed to eliminate all external sensations. It is set in a future in which everyone is bombarded by outside stimuli. Patio House shelters its inhabitants from those stimuli.

Designed around light

Even during early concept designs, Patio House was designed with natural light as the main focal point.

Using realistic sun simulations during this process gave a realistic view of how light would interact with the house.

Shielding

The design went through a multitude of steps. Each iteration increasingly focussed inwards.

The final design has only one window facing outward. All other light comes through via the patio or windows in the roof

Ever-changing

Tactically placed cut-outs produce interesting lighting effects throughout the day ...

Uniquely familiar

... coating the interior in a way that is always unique, yet familiar.

Routing

Instead of light-blocking walls, each 'room' in Patio House is shifted three steps up. This separates each space, yet keeps an open appearance.

Space efficient

Because Patio House has no outward facing windows, houses can be arranged closer together. The height of the lowest wall is slightly higher than eye-level to pique the interest of passers-by, while still ensuring privacy for its inhabitants.

BLÅBÄR

A hand-powered fruit juicer

Reimagining an existing patent

BLÅBÄR (Swedish for blueberry) was designed with an existing patent as the starting point, but that's where the similarities end. BLÅBÄR looks completely different, but keeps the functionality; pressing and filtering fruit.

Iterations

BLÅBÄR went through many iterations before the shape reflected the intended use. A circle at the top that gently curves into a hexagon at the bottom. The spiral shape hinting to the user that rotation is key in this product.

For everyone

By using the compressive force exerted by rotating a helical thread, the user can squeeze the juice from a variety of fruits by hand without requiring a great amount of force.

This also eliminates the need for loud electric motors, allowing the user to enjoy their morning beverage in peace and serenity.

Easy to use

The user can pour freshly squeezed juice straight from BLÅBÄR. It is also dishwasher safe and disassembles into four easy to clean parts.

alpha beta

A watch that bends time

alpha beta

Time with a twist

A device that is worn for hours on-end should be comfortable. alpha beta is designed to curve gently with the wrist.

Meticulously machined

alpha beta was designed to explore the possibilities that 5-axis machining brings, sporting beautiful curved surfaces and intricate details.

Personal projects

Lights

A first step into combining hard- and software

Lights

Lights was a project born from a desire to control LED strips via WiFi. At the time I had just discovered that Arduinos could be connected to your home network and that opened up a host of possibilities.

This project is invaluable to me as it showed me the usefulness of being able to code. It was a daunting task for a beginning hobbyist programmer. Combining electronics with http requests, JavaScript and website design.

Together with Alexander Weiss I'm currently working on a new and improved version of Lights. With a better UI, simpler setup process, and more refined control over rooms.

Precise control

The web-app (which was developed mainly by Alexander Weiss) allows multiple channels to be controlled individually, or as groups. The colours smoothly transition from one to the other, even when dimming to extremely low values.

Billions of colours

We achieve this smooth dimming by accessing the Arduino's 16-Bit timers directly. This allows for a staggering 65.536 dimming steps per colour, instead of the usual 256. Simply put, we can make 256 steps for each 1 step of a conventional LED dimmer, resulting in extremely smooth color-to color transitions no matter how far the light is dimmed.

281

billion colour combinations

smooth color transitions

flexible transition speed

Ultimate entertainment

I went one step further and connected the Arduino to my media centre pc and wrote a Python addon for Kodi, transforming it into a room-wide ambilight system for movies and tv shows. It automatically and smoothly transitions from normal lighting mode into tv-ambilight mode and back.

Audi R8

3D modelling

Audi R8

In the summer of 2011 I decided to model an Audi R8 from scratch to hone my 3D modelling and rendering skills.

References

When I say from scratch, I don't mean off the top of my head. I set up a couple of blueprints as references.

Blocking it out

When I say from scratch, I don't mean off the top of my head. I set up a couple of blueprints as references.

Tweak, tweak & tweak some more

After a lot of tinkering with the car model, many materials and the studio environment, a photo-realistic render is the result

It's all in the details

Small details of the car give it its distinctive character and make it look more like its real-life counterpart. Each LED, for example, is modelled completely, including a tiny reflector inside the LED's plastic housing

Materials

One of the most time consuming (and fun) parts of 3D rendering is making materials. This is where the illusion of realism can be made or broken.