LECTORAAT CHANGE MANAGEMENT – De Haagse Hogeschool

What does it mean to become a future professional?

That question sits at the heart of The Optimal Future Professional — a research performance born out of the lived experiences of UX design students at De Haagse Hogeschool.

This is not a lecture. It is not a panel. It is an embodied exploration of design students’ experiences as they learn to become designers. The performance touches on the tensions, contradictions, expectations, and quiet negotiations that shape how they see themselves, how they present themselves, and how they feel about their emerging professional identities.

Where the performance comes from?

The work draws directly from the 2025 Optimal Future Design Professional workshops, in which more than 50 students were invited to reflect on professionalism in their own words, through their own experiences.

Through movement and text, the performance makes visible what often goes unsaid: how students navigate between personal values, university expectations, and the imagined demands of the professional world. It does not resolve these tensions, but it holds them and invites the audience to sit with them too.

After the performance: join the conversation

Each performance is followed by an open discussion.

What kind of professional does design education actually shape, and who decides? Whose image of the “ideal designer” are programs built around, and what gets left out? What do students experience in the process of becoming professionals that rarely makes it into a curriculum or a report?

How does a professional identity form over time, and what tensions, losses, or quiet compromises come with it? What is the distance between design education and design practice, and who is responsible for bridging it?

And perhaps what can embodied, artistic formats reveal that a written report cannot? How does experiencing research, rather than reading it, change how knowledge is felt, remembered, and carried forward?

These are live, open questions. You are warmly invited to bring your own.