About Candle

Our goals

Candle is a project under the umbrella of The New Explorers foundation.
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‌Our goal is to research and accelerate the development of privacy protecting smart home systems.

‌We believe good design can give us both privacy and ease of use.

Why we created Candle

We are a group of Dutch technologists, designers and thinkers, most of us from Amsterdam, who felt that we could inspire the market by creating examples of the products we would like to see. Our goal with Candle is to provoke the market into creating the products we would be willing to buy.

Protecting privacy is better for consumers, but it also makes business sense. Just as the market for ecological food has exploded in the past decade, we foresee a similar growth for ethical technology in the decade to come.

We hope to be a part of that change.

Lead designer: Tijmen Schep

T‌ijmen has a long history in writing about and teaching IoT design.

- Graduated Utrecht University with a critical analysis of the work of Mark Weiser, the 'father of the internet of things'.
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- Helped set up a course called "ubicomp design" (which we would now call "IoT design") at the HvA design school in Amsterdam. The course is still being taught today.
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- Wrote a book about privacy design called "Design my Privacy", released in 2016, co-funded by the HvA and the MOTI design Museum. It's available in both Dutch and English from BIS publishers, and is used by multiple Dutch and even German design schools.