Meet alumnus Robin Bergman
Although he works for the Deloitte international management consulting firm, Robin Bergman identifies himself as an "artist, designer and researcher". He is fascinated by technology and nature, and the tensions that exist between them.
After studying at the Willem de Kooning school of arts, Robin Bergman graduated from the Media Technology MSc program in August 2018. He now works as technology experience designer for the Deloitte management consulting firm.
Despite his business-oriented employer, Robin refers to himself as an "artist, designer and researcher". His works originate from tensions that he identifies between nature and technology, and their structures, arrangements and disturbances. He conducts research, makes objects and installations, and writes to give insights into matter which he finds relevant to (re)consider.
Read more about Robin's work on his personal website robinbergman.nl.
(Image: Robin Bergman. Credit: Robin Bergman himself)
Exploring technological futures
For his Media Technology MSc thesis, Robin studied how different media made users explore and expand on technological futures differently. The media forms compared in his research were the physical object, the written word and a hybrid of the two.
He presented participants with a future world in which ectogenesis, better known as the artificial womb, was manifest. This future world was developed in the forms of text, a physical object and a hybrid form. Explorative qualitative research was conducted to analyse the experiences of the participants, in addition to a comparative case study.
The full study is described in his thesis Exploring Technological Futures: The Use of Different Media, Text, Physical Object or Hybrid.
What makes Robin match with the Media Technology program?
Although he has a strong arts-oriented prior education, Robin understands science and fundamental research. He is capable of thinking like an artist, while applying his skills to academic research. And vice versa.
This cross-disciplinary quality makes that he can hold his very special position at Deloitte, effectively being a corporate artist/scientist.
(Photo at top of page: "Online Activity Matching", another project by Robin. Photo credit: Robin Bergman)