Gijs Ockeloen

Managing Partner

I asked my first employer, Philips Design, to label me as ‘design introspector’ on my business card. Meaning I was interested in the socio-cultural implications of technology. I am driven by an urge to enable people to connect with an increasingly complex world of material and digital artefacts, services and operations.

Soon I will have been in the business for 40 years and I still maintain that creating anything in mass volumes is a moral job, more so than an economic or aesthetic one. I am happy that I am surrounded by others, both my colleagues in my studio as well as the ones I work with, who invest their skills in contributing to creating social conditions that enable people to live sensible, productive, independent and harmonious lives.

Timeline:
• 1979 - Delft Technical University. Studied Industrial Design
• 1986 - Ohio State University. Spent a semester to study Semantic Applications in Product Design with professor Reinhard Butter.
• 1986 - Philips Design. Designing medical equipment and industrial electronics. His iconic design for the Integris C (a Cath-lab x-ray system) marked a new approach in Philips medical equipment design
• 1989 - Founded ‘dok industrial design’ with Maurits de Koning, aimed at developing products for professional users.
• 1991 - Lecturing at the ‘Gerrit Rietveld Academy’
• 1994 - Advisory committee ‘Netherlands Foundation for Fine Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB)’
• 2004 - Coaching industrial design students at the Technical University Eindhoven
• 2006 - Merged his design studio with Reframing Studio

Gijs Ockeloen and professor Matthijs van Dijk co-own Reframing Studio.