Abel Dieterich

I started in Computer Science, and what pulled me toward HCI afterward was a simple realization: a technically excellent piece of software is worthless if nobody enjoys using it, or nobody can figure out how to. I want to build things, software and hardware both, that are good and good to use.

I run a homelab, which taught me a lot about servers and infrastructure. Self-hosting also showed me that a lot of things can be done better than what big tech gives us by default. I build embedded systems (ESP32, sensors, custom PCBs) as a genuine hobby too, so I bring real engineering depth to projects that other HCI students might only design or prototype. PlantBand is a good example: I didn't just design the idea of plants that make music, I built the capacitive touch sensing, the LED control, and the firmware that made it real and testable.

That same depth carries into my job: I work as a full-stack developer on Charge Research Platform Volt, an AI-powered knowledge base that lets you search like Google, navigate like Wikipedia, and ask questions in natural language, built on RAG, automatic metadata extraction, and an LLM-powered chatbot. It started as my bachelor's final project, and I was asked to stay on and keep building it as a job.

I'm currently deepening that combination with a Human-Computer Interaction MSc at Utrecht University, with a particular interest in how technical systems can be evaluated rigorously (statistical modeling, structured user studies) rather than just judged by feel.