About Namahn

Namahn was founded in 1987 with a view to helping organisations create products, services or tools that are designed from the user up. Namahn remains independently owned. One of its great strengths lies in its pragmatic methods and techniques, grown out of experience in hundreds of projects.

Namahn's clients are to be found in a wide variety of sectors and today include AstraZeneca Global, Atos Worldline, Belgacom, bpost, Electrabel, Eurocontrol, Fluxys, Isabel, Siemens, Sony Europe, VRT and several European, Belgian and Flemish public authorities.

As a professional services firm, Namahn's relationship with its clients is one based on trust. We earn this trust through our unrelenting attention to our clients' satisfaction, combined with a continuous effort to clarify expectations.

Choosing a consultant is never easy, particularly in a specialised field like Human-Centered Design (HCD). We believe that three criteria are important:

Expertise: does the firm have proven expertise in Human-Centered Design? Our core expertise in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is augmented by expertise in engineering disciplines, cognitive ergonomics, visual design and the social sciences. This mix of skills helps us to understand a variety of complex business domains.

Experience: craftsmanship can only be acquired through practice. Much of the craft of designing digital products lays in the repertoire of the designer and in the process followed. Namahn has been designing digital products for consumer, business and technical markets for over 20 years, and has completed literally hundreds of projects, applying our methods across multiple domains for a large variety of organisations.

Approach: as craftsmen, we at Namahn follow a rigorous process. We focus exclusively on Human-Centered Design. Perhaps this explains why some of our clients have been with us for more than 10 years.

Namahn is involved in projects ranging from small to very large. Our contribution to these projects takes a variety of shapes and forms. We can come in as trainers, coaches, individual consultants, or as a complete project team. For details refer to How we work with our clients.

Our clients highly value our network of professionals from associated disciplines, in particular, specialised suppliers of technical services (such as custom software builders) or design services (such as industrial design) that fall outside our scope. Being a fairly small contributor to sometimes very large projects, we understand the ins and outs of partnering.

Namahn is located in central Brussels in an elegantly refurbished 19th century printing factory. Our offices house one of the largest specialist libraries on Human-Centered Design in Europe.

Namahn is a member of:

• Agoria, the Belgian federation for the technology industry (www.agoria.be)
• ITS Belgium, an organisation stimulating innovation and collaboration in the sector of intelligent telematics solutions (www.itsbelgium.be)
• Leuven.inc, the Leuven innovation networking circle (www.leuveninc.com)
• Vereniging van Vlaamse Industriële Ontwerpbureaus (vVio)

Namahn design consultants are frequent guest lecturers at academic institutions:

• Hasselt University: 'User-Centered Systems Design' (master's degree)
• Haute Ecole Albert Jacquard (Namur): 'Ecole Supérieure d'Infographie' (bachelor's degree
• Hochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd (Germany): 'Produktgestaltung' (master's degree)
• Hogeschool Antwerpen: 'Product development - industrial design' (master's degree)
• Hogeschool Sint-Lukas (Brussels): 'Transmedia - Arts + Media + Design' (postgraduate degree)
• K.U.Leuven: 'Applied Informatics' (master's degree)
• K.U.Leuven Kortrijk: 'Integral Product Development' (postgraduate degree)
• University of Ghent: 'MICT'
• University of Antwerp Management School (UAMS): 'Product Innovation & Entrepreneurship' (postgraduate degree)
• Vrije Universiteit Brussel: 'Communication Science' (master's degree)