About

This is my personal website. I am founder of Target_is_New, that focuses on future research, product discovery, and design strategy. With a weekly newsletter I share reflections on human technology relations and the latest in robotics and augmented intelligence.

I am founder and chair of the Cities of Things Foundation, a research program that originated at TU Delft and is now a knowledge platform and field lab coordinator in partnership with both academic partners as industry. A special project is Wijkbot / Hoodbot, a prototype toolkit for urban robotics, developed in close partnership with Creating010 of Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.

I am initiator and organiser of the Dutch chapter of ThingsCon since 2014. The ThingsCon foundation is organising a yearly conference and dedicated Salons.


Educated as an industrial design engineer, I worked since October 2022 as design director at startup Structural. Before, I was research director at the internet agency INFO responsible for LABS.

I co-founded the meetup-series Behavior Design AMS and initiated and organized ThingConAMS since 2014, and I chair ThingsCon Amsterdam foundation since 2017. I curate multiple Salons and the yearly conference in December.

In April 2017 I started 1 day a week as a visiting professor at the Connected Everyday Lab, TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering setting up a research program on Cities of Things. Since 2018 I’m co-director of the Delft Design Lab Cities of Things. Since 2021 we established Cities of Things Foundation in order to build a knowledge hub and field labs around that theme.

See also my profile on LinkedIn

In this blog I post on things I recon as interesting new developments or important trends. Check also my Medium-publication of LABS. Weekly I post updates that you can also subscribe to via Ghost. Monthly I post reflections on Cities of Things via a newsletter at Substack.

You can follow me on TwitterInstagram, and Flickr and a bunch of other networks. I like to try new things 🙂 Try iskandr if you want to find me.

Public speaking (selection)

2008 Reboot 8 (Copenhagen), Emerce Eday (Rotterdam)

2009 Mobile Monday #10 (Amsterdam), Reboot 9 (Copenhagen), EuroIA (Copenhagen), Emerce Eday (Rotterdam)

2010 Marketing Pioneers (Amsterdam), The Next Web (Amsterdam), National Marketing Day (Bussum), The Web And Beyond (Amsterdam), Digital Recruitment (Utrecht), GX Connect (Amsterdam)

2011 Club of Amsterdam – Future of Services (Amsterdam), Liquid Internet – Web 3.0 (Utrecht), Annual Internet of Things Europe (Brussels), PICNIC (Amsterdam), Online Tuesday (Amsterdam)

2012 Seminar Short Range Wireless Communication (Tilburg), Club of Amsterdam – Future of Taxes (Amsterdam), Knowledge session Big Data (Amsterdam), Media Battle (Utrecht), CMO Dinner (Amsterdam), Dutch Design Week (Eindhoven), Inbo Architects (Woudenberg), UX Cocktailhour (Amsterdam)

2013 ProductTank (Amsterdam), IoT Week (Rotterdam), IoT Europe event (Eindhoven), Facebook Marketing Event (Utrecht), Shopping Today (Almere), Innovatie-estafette (Amsterdam), TU Delft Honors Program (Delft), Interactieve Professionals Associatie Netherlands (Amsterdam), Adobe User Group (Rotterdam)

2014 Rabobank innovation session (Utrecht), Webwinkel Vakdagen (Utrecht), Cross Media Cafe (Hilversum), Mens voor de Lens (Amsterdam), Young Equens, Shopping2020 (Utrecht), Data of the Crowds (Rotterdam), Ministry of General Affairs (The Hague), Google Glass Meetup (Amsterdam), Amsterdam Creative Industries Future of Retail (Amsterdam), Thingscon (Amsterdam), OPEN Wear (Amsterdam)

2015 Firestarters (Amsterdam), A-wearable (Rotterdam), Thingscon (Berlin), Are You Connected? (Rotterdam), Hack The Visual (London), IoT Shifts (Barcelona), ThingsCon Amsterdam

2016 IoT Eindhoven, IoT Olympics (Amsterdam), Behavioral Informatics Seminar (Amsterdam), Bosch Connected Experience (Berlin), SXSW (Austin), NRC Live (Amsterdam), Rockstart Smart Energy Summit (Amsterdam), ThingsCon Salon #1 (Amsterdam), CrossMediaCafé (Hilversum), DrupalJam (Utrecht), Campus Party (Utrecht), Darefest (Antwerpen), IoT and the City (Amsterdam), DDA in Paris, UX Cocktailhour (Amsterdam), ThingsCon Amsterdam

2017 Bitcoin Wednesday (Amsterdam), Cross Media Café (Hilversum), SXSW New Dutch Wave (Austin), Data and the Self hackathon (Rotterdam), Avans Hogeschool (Breda), ThingsCon Shenzhen (Shenzhen), Butterfly Works (Amsterdam), Dare (Amsterdam), ThingsCon (Amsterdam)

2018 Symposium Things As Citizens (Amsterdam), Rotary (Purmerend), IoT Rotterdam, AVANS (Breda), Brunel (Utrecht), The Next Web (Amsterdam), Border Sessions (Den Haag), HvA Festival (Amsterdam), DRIVE (Eindhoven)

2019 BTCM (Amsterdam), TU IDE (Delft), Media Perspectives (Hilversum), HU (Utrecht), MILE (Amsterdam), IoT Rotterdam (Rotterdam), AVANS (Breda), Digital Society School (Amsterdam), Sensemakers (Amsterdam), Behavior Design AMS (Amsterdam), ThingsCon (Rotterdam)

2020 TUD IDE (Delft), AVANS (online), Media Perspectives (online), VanMoof (online), NGI Summit (online), ThingsCon (online)

2021 TUD IDE (Delft), IoT Rotterdam (online), AVANS (online), DAAD Berlin (online), Media Architecture Biennale (online), Cities of Things (Munich)