Limburg native, mountain marathon enthusiast and doting new father, Olivier pursued a career in architecture before finding himself pulled toward flash-animation work and the complexities of interaction design. He has a Civil Engineering degree in Architecture and a Master's degree in Cultural Studies both from Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven.
When I was 17 we took a trip to Paris and I remember Le Corbusier made a huge impression on me. I decided then and there I wanted to be an architect. I practiced for about ten years, seven of which I spent at a small architecture firm in Ghent, mostly designing office buildings and housing projects, which I loved.
It was a confluence of several factors. After ten years in architecture I felt that, theoretically, I could build any building in Belgium and that I wasn't learning anymore. I started getting interested in flash-animation design and designing websites, especially database-driven websites. I just picked up some books, started teaching myself and realised I was having more fun doing Internet design than designing buildings. My girlfriend and I also wanted to start a family and a career change seemed well suited to this other big life change. Our daughter Maya was born last April.
Friends told me that Namahn was the kind of company I was looking for. I made an appointment with Joannes and was really struck by his energy. Although at the time Namahn wasn't hiring, I began attending their guest lecture series and got a sense of the company culture and the people who worked there.
Then in the late summer Namahn called on me to help redesign an existing software package for a client. It gave me a chance to collaborate with my future colleagues and become familiar with the way they worked.
I'm attracted to Namahn's clear focus. Namahn has really been a pioneer. There's hardly anyone in Belgium doing what we're doing. Also, interaction design is getting so complex that it requires a collaborative effort and that's what excites me about this work. My first project is for a large utility company, preparing the groundwork for the next generation of its website.
Mountain marathons are, well, running marathons in the mountains! My girlfriend is the inspiration behind that pursuit. She got me interested in regular running about five years ago and I ran two marathons last year in Brussels and Rotterdam.
I love the Russians Dostoevsky and Chekhov, and the Portuguese writer Pessoa. In fact, the chance to indulge in reading and exploring the world of the mind was the big impetus for my graduate work in Cultural Studies.