Dirk van de Mortel interactive
cognitive designer · integration engineer
I design for how people think. What someone expects from a thing, what they have forgotten since they last used it, what they do when it goes wrong: that is where a design holds or fails, and no single discipline covers it. So I have worked across the whole scope, research, design, hardware and software, from a gaming table with eighty illuminated buttons to a playlist editor for a café owner at midnight. That is what I mean by cognitive designer.
Today that scope runs through systems rather than screens. As Integration & LLM Engineer at SPECTR B.V. I build the connective tissue for enterprise AI: document processing and prompt orchestration in Python, LLM and agent functionality joined to the services and data a business already runs on. Underneath that is the integration work I have done since 2019, the APIs, messaging and middleware that a retailer, a health insurer and a public agency run on. And underneath that is the interaction background, which is why I treat a system interface as a contract, with explicit expectations and failure modes.
The through-line
Twenty-five years, in order: art school, installations, research, software, platforms. Walk the timeline, 1992–now →
Selected work
If any of it is familiar, say hi.
