Biography
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
Joseph Campbell
Dirk van de Mortel studied laboratory sciences in medical and technical microbiology, qualifying in 1997, which laid his fundamentals for research and technology. He went on to the higher laboratory course and left it in 1999, which meant a year of working out what to do instead. What he already had was a passion for computing and for communication in all its versatility, and it pointed somewhere the laboratory did not. He found it at the department of Art, Media and Technology of the Utrecht School of the Arts in Hilversum, where he earned a Bachelor of Art and Technology with Honours and a Master of Arts in Interactive Multi-Media in 2003, with a strong emphasis on physical play and tangible interaction. The ScratchWorx VJ/DJ table and the ApartGame console came out of that work.
From 2003 he worked as a self-employed creative developer, implementing interactive solutions for clients of his own. At JVH Gaming Products in Tilburg he set up a new department within Research and Development, New Entertainment, with Roel Creemers, running from 2004 to 2006. There he developed the ApartGame into a market-ready product and co-developed the Weeble prototypes, demonstrating entertainment computing for public use through these new interfaces. Alongside that he was a Core Team Member, design coach and project lead at Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, one day a week, and project manager of a large walk-through installation for cultural computing, Project ALICE. In 2006 he began the post-master User-System Interaction programme at the same faculty, earning a Professional Doctorate in Engineering in 2008.
A research traineeship at Philips Research followed in 2008, comparing laboratory testing with remote online testing on the WebLabs platform. He was a development consultant at Bikkels in Alkmaar in 2009 and 2010, then joined Next Level Serious Software in Eindhoven, where from 2010 he was the lead and largely the only developer on the narrowcasting platform SeriousBox, full-time until 2014 and three days a week after that. From 2014 he picked up more freelance work, and from October 2016 to January 2019 he was a Technical Support Engineer at the Department of Industrial Design in Eindhoven, supporting student research prototypes and building installations of his own, among them Closer to Nature.
Since 2019 his work has been integration engineering. At Conclusion Integration in Nieuwegein he owned and operated business-critical integration landscapes in regulated environments, across retail, public administration and health insurance, migrating ESB estates toward API- and event-driven architectures on Azure and AWS. Since May 2026 he has been at SPECTR B.V. as an Integration and LLM Engineer.
The thread through all of it is the same one: treating the interface between a person and a system, or between one system and another, as a contract with explicit expectations and failure modes. He has published on tangible tabletop play, head-up games for children and multi-sensory engagement for people with dementia. He lives in Eindhoven.