Setting the scene
It was a grey Thursday morning at Strijp-S. Summer was starting to fade and the area felt unusually calm.
I was heading toward the Apparatenfabriek, one of the old Philips factory buildings that still carries much of its industrial history. At the entrance, a concierge sat behind a glass window surrounded by mailboxes and packages. Even the elevator felt like it belonged to another era: slow, slightly clunky, with a large physical telephone still mounted inside.
I told the concierge I was meeting Lei Nelissen and was pointed toward the fifth floor. Before I got there, someone in the hallway overheard his name.
“Lei? He’s on my floor. Come with me.”
We stepped into the elevator together. He told me he was not working with Lei, but in a studio further down the hallway. I asked what he was making in the building.
A candle extrusion machine.
It was not the answer I expected, but he immediately started explaining it. This was not going to be the next big tech company. It was more of an art installation.
By the time we reached his floor, his elevator pitch was clear. And it captured something about the Apparatenfabriek itself: each floor holds a different kind of work, from software and design studios to workshops, artists and people building things that do not fit neatly into a business category.
Lei’s studio was behind a bright orange door. Inside, it was light and spacious, with desks for software work, a small workshop for building things, and orange accents running through the space, including the cable trays mounted along the walls.
It felt somewhere between a software company and a design workshop. Which turned out to be a pretty good description of the work itself.
What he does
Lei studied Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology and later worked at Bureau Moeilijke Dingen.
Today he runs Studio Falkland, a design studio for internet technology and personal data. Its work sits between design and technology, exploring how digital systems can become more transparent, distributed and accessible.
A recurring question underneath it all is simple: if the internet has become indispensable, who does it really serve?
That interest goes back to Lei’s graduation work. European privacy law gives people the right to ask a company what personal data it holds about them and receive a copy. In some cases, people can also receive data they provided in a machine-readable form and move it to another service.
On paper, that creates more control. In practice, receiving a folder full of technical files does not help much if you cannot understand what any of it means.
Lei worked on making that data visible and understandable. It is a small distinction with much larger consequences.
Giving someone a choice is not the same as giving them meaningful control.
What we talked about
Convenience becomes dependence
We started talking before we had properly sat down.
Much of the digital infrastructure people use every day comes bundled together: email, cloud hosting, office software, authentication and storage. Alternatives exist. You can use different email providers, open-source software or European services.
But switching has a cost.
Take a large company. It could theoretically assemble its digital workplace from many independent services. But someone then needs to integrate them, secure them, maintain them and support thousands of employees using them.
Or the company can buy most of it from Microsoft.
It is easy to understand why organizations choose the second option. The more systems become connected, the harder they become to replace. A convenient choice slowly turns into a dependency.
Lei is interested in making those dependencies visible. Not necessarily because every dependency is bad, but because it is worth knowing which ones we have accepted almost by accident.
That is also part of the work he is preparing for Dutch Design Week. His installation will allow visitors to explore the digital services and infrastructure underneath ordinary parts of their lives and see where those dependencies lead.
Before deciding whether something needs to change, you first need to know it exists.
When a choice is not really a choice
Privacy brings up a similar problem.
Websites often ask for permission to use optional tracking. Yet the way that permission is presented can make a huge difference.
Everyone knows the experience. A website loads. A box appears. You can accept all cookies and continue, or open a dense screen full of settings that nobody particularly wants to read.
Technically, you were given a choice. But Lei’s work asks a more interesting question: did you actually understand what you agreed to?
He compared digital tracking with walking around a supermarket while someone follows you with a notebook. They record which aisle you enter, what you pick up, what you put back and where you spend your time.
In a physical supermarket, that behaviour would immediately be noticeable. Online, much of it happens quietly in the background.
That does not mean collecting data is automatically wrong. Companies can use information to understand how products are being used and where they can improve. The harder question is what information is reasonable to collect, why it is needed and whether the person sharing it genuinely understands that exchange.
That is where design becomes important. Compliance can tell you what has to be there. Design determines whether anyone can actually use it.
Collect everything. Share nothing.
At some point we reached a tension I had not thought much about before.
Companies have an incentive to ask for as much permission as possible. If there is even a chance that certain information becomes useful later, it can be easier to cover every possible scenario upfront.
Consumers naturally move in the opposite direction. Give someone a detailed screen containing twenty switches asking whether they want to share personal information and there is a good chance they switch everything off.
Both sides are behaving logically. The company wants flexibility. The consumer wants privacy.
Taken to their extremes, however, you end up with collect everything on one side and share nothing on the other. Neither is particularly useful.
This made regulation more interesting to me.
I have generally been fairly relaxed about privacy. My data is probably spread across plenty of systems already, so I sometimes struggle to get excited about another rule governing exactly what can be collected.
But I had mostly viewed regulation as a restriction placed on companies. There is another way to look at it.
When both sides naturally optimize for themselves, regulation can define the space in between. What information is reasonable for a company to need? What protection is reasonable for a person to expect?
That does not make writing good regulation easy. But it explains why simply leaving everything to either companies or consumers does not necessarily produce the best outcome.
The hard part starts after the concept
Our conversation eventually moved from what Lei designs to how he works.
At one point I suggested that someone like him could create concepts for better digital products, publish them and let others take the ideas further. He did not find that particularly satisfying.
Designers enjoy the conceptual stage. You get to explore possibilities, make something look convincing and show how the world could work differently. Then implementation starts.
You have to write the code, deal with technical limitations, maintain it, find customers and fix everything that goes wrong. That is the difficult part.
Lei believes designers should be willing to follow their ideas into that part too. His decision to start Studio Falkland was one version of that.
Rather than stopping at concepts, he wanted to remain involved when an idea met reality: the software, the client work, the technical constraints and the ongoing maintenance.
That matters for privacy too. Giving people better information is not enough if the system around them still makes the meaningful choice difficult. Someone has to build the tools, interfaces and services that make control practical.
One day Lei might be behind a computer finishing code for a client. With Dutch Design Week approaching, another day involves going to the hardware store, buying wood and building an installation by hand.
For an industrial designer, that combination seems quite fitting.
Reflections
Consent is not enough
The conversation changed how I think about consent.
Consent sounds like control. Someone asks for permission. You say yes or no. The decision appears to be in your hands.
But that is not the whole picture.
The company decides what to ask for, how to explain it and how easy it is to decline. The person seeing the request often has little time, little context and no realistic way to judge what each option will mean later.
Meanwhile, businesses have reasons to collect more information and people have reasons to protect their privacy. Neither side needs to be malicious for those incentives to collide.
Consent does not resolve that conflict. It simply puts the decision in front of the individual, one cookie banner at a time.
Regulation defines the middle
This is where regulation becomes more useful than I had previously appreciated.
Its role is not to ban all data collection or assume that companies cannot be trusted. It is to define a basic deal when the incentives of both sides pull in opposite directions.
What information is reasonable for a company to need? What must it explain? What should a person be able to refuse without being punished by a worse service or a confusing process?
Those are not questions that every person should have to solve alone, late at night, while trying to read an article or buy something online.
Good regulation does not remove every trade-off. It sets the conditions for a fairer one.
Control has to be usable
Lei’s graduation project stayed with me because it makes the problem concrete.
You can have a legal right to access your data and still be powerless if the result is a folder full of files you cannot interpret. You can have a cookie banner and still not understand what you are agreeing to.
A right only becomes useful when someone can actually use it.
That is why this is not only a legal question. It is also a design question.
The better digital system is not the one that gives people the most settings. It is the one that makes the important parts clear enough that people can understand what is happening and act on it.