Picture a hailstorm, and rain coming down in buckets. You’re in an office on the fifth floor of a former squatting house, staring out over the vastness of Rotterdam. Trees are sweeping from side to side. A carbon racing bike leans against the window, still slightly wet. This is the workplace of Lieke, Hackastory’s lead designer. She’d just braved a storm to make it to work on time. “It’s only a bit of water,” she says of it now. That’s typically Lieke.
Like several other Hackanauts (a compound of ‘hacking’ and ‘astronauts’, because at Hackastory we hack journalism and aim for the moon), Lieke studied communication and multimedia design in Breda. She didn’t jump into the Hackaverse without hesitation. When Nienke (her teacher at the time) asked her to join a hackathon, she enrolled but later pulled back, tight on money and unsure of what a hackathon entailed. A year later, she was teaching alongside Nienke, who extended a second invitation. This time she went. She fell in love with Hackastory.
After her graduation, she joined Hackastory’s Popup Summer Office (a sort of a in-house hackathon) and never left. She soon reached a turning point at which she knew she wanted to stay with Hackastory: she had to choose between easy money for dull work, or extreme creative freedom in a young, growing company. She chose carefully and wisely. “I never looked back,” she says.
The real world
Some people say that, while you may learn a lot in school, it can’t prepare you for the real world, that what education gives you is a title (‘designer,’ ‘storyteller,’ ‘rocket scientist’), a mindset and the basic skills you need, but that the real learning happens on the job. Lieke tells me that this was her experience. She was thrown into the deep end, designing a website from scratch. “I’d never made a good website before,” Lieke tells me. “By actively using the programs, I learned the ins and outs that school didn’t teach me.”
At Hackastory, there’s a strong belief in learning by doing, and Lieke is living proof that it works. Initially she focused on honing her practical tool skills. “I wanted to learn how to use the tools in a real scenario,” Lieke says. “It was only by doing that I learned when to use which tools.” Nonetheless, it took a finished new Hackastory logo for her to develop confidence in her skills: “Everything that could go wrong in designing a logo, did. When the finished product was finally there, I started taking myself seriously as a designer.” She’s also started venturing into content and contextual design.
Shooting For the Moon
Lieke credits her work at Hackastory for helping her believe in herself and trust her competence. Through her job, she’s learned how to cope with fear of failure: “When I was still in school, I would nearly faint every time I had to give a presentation,” she tells me. As time went on, she was able to develop confidence in her skills. Recently, she gave a masterclass all by herself at TU Delft like it was second nature.
Lieke at the TU Delft masterclass
She also learned how to underpromise and overdeliver. For example, during Hackastory’s recent Prague Hackathon, she helped the attendees in designing a logo – something they weren’t expecting. “I think I do that by saying I’m insecure, young, or inexperienced at first but then I make sure I deliver great work.” She tells me that she’s learned that maybe she’s not as timid and introverted as she thought. “I managed to develop a ‘new me’ through the vibe of the company,” she tells me. “Hackastory gave me the space and possibility to grow, to open up and discover new sides of myself.”
What more could you want out of a job? You know you’re in the right place when your work turns you upside down like that. Lieke knows better than to take it all for granted. “It’s the perfect job for me,” she says. She’ll jump on her racing bike and go through wind and weather to make it to work on time. Lieke’s in it for the long run, and she’s shooting for the moon.