Portrait of Wout, his head turned right bottom of the picture. The lighting is intense pink with deep, vibrant blue shadows.
Portrait of Wout by Mick Michel.

WOUT

/waʊt/

I'm an artist, designer, and software developer from Belgium, currently based in Spain. In my creative work, I explore the collaboration with machines. I work primarily with paper porcelain.

Education

  • 1997-2002

    Bachelor's degree at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Men and Living department (Human-centred Design, Sustainability, Innovation, and Experimentation).

  • 1999

    Socrates exchange programme at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (Furniture Design, Screen Printing and Hand-Drawn Animation).

Noteworthy Events

  • 2022 talk

    Guest speaker at the University of Oxford, OxBAT Conference.

  • 2022-present exhibition

    OpenStructures Web Platform v1 at the Design Museum in Ghent, Belgium (permanent collection).

  • 2018 award

    FSC Project Award 2018 for QuadriVille, a modular generative design project.

  • 2015-2016 exhibition

    “Who's afraid of red, white and gold” group exhibition Kunst Gallery in Sitges, Barcelona.

  • 2007-2015

    Work and travel around Europe and Mexico as a digital nomad.

  • 2003-2005 exhibition

    Traveling group exhibition with the Poetry Floor in The Netherlands.

  • 2003-2004 exhibition

    Confituur Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium; artist-owned art gallery.

  • 2003 exhibition

    “Wohnträume – Wohnräume” group exhibition at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Switzerland.

  • 2003 exhibition

    Group exhibition in Cultureel Centrum Berchem, Belgium.

  • 2002 exhibition

    “Ideaal! wonen: Smart Alice” group exhibition at Centraal Museum Utrecht, The Netherlands.

  • 2002 exhibition

    Spotlight exhibition at the Entrance of Interior Biennale Kortrijk, Belgium.

  • 2002 exhibition

    “Young Fairytales” group exhibition at Interior Biennale Kortrijk, Belgium.

  • 2002 award

    Design for Europe award 2002 for Tilthouse, a tiny housing unit.

  • 2001 exhibition

    “Twisted Perception” group exhibition in Antwerp, Belgium.

  • 1997 exhibition

    “Let There Be Light” group exhibition in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
A series of profile pictures of Wout Fierens, visual artist, designer, and creative coder, taken by mickmichel.com

In software

For the past 25 years, I've been working as a software developer. My development work is mostly focussed around Ruby on Rails, but I tend to prefer Lucky Framework or Hanami for new projects.

Notable applications I built include the first version of the OpenStructures platform (2008–2016); Paspartout, a portfolio and e-commerce platform for artists and designers (2008–2020); and Zwartopwit, an e-commerce website for an online printer specialising in sustainable and artisanal production (2007–present).

Currently, I'm working on a new, open-source website builder called Fluck. It's a tool for artists, designers, and makers to build a website or online shop. Fluck will be launched late 2025.

Noteworthy Open-Source Contributions

  • 2022-present crystal

    Creator and maintainer of base_x.cr, a Crystal shard for base encoding/decoding.

  • 2021-present crystal

    Creator and maintainer of Rosetta, a blazing-fast internationalization (i18n) library for Crystal with compile-time key lookup.

  • 2021-2022 Crystal

    Contributer to Shrine.cr, the Crystal version of Ruby's Shrine.rb.

  • 2020-present crystal

    Creator and maintainer of Mollie.cr, the unofficial Crystal shard wrapping the Mollie Payments API.

  • 2020-2023 crystal

    Contributor to Avram, Lucky Framework's Database ORM.

  • 2020-2023 crystal

    Contributor to Lucky Framework, a full-featured web framework for Crystal.

  • 2012-2017 javascript svg

    Creator and maintainer of SVG.js, a lightweight library for manipulating and animating SVG. Versions 1.x and 2.x.

  • 2011-2024 javascript svg

    Creator and maintainer of Raphaël Zoom, a plugin for the Raphaël JS library.

  • 2011-2023 javascript svg

    Creator and maintainer of Raphaël SVG Import, a plugin for the Raphaël JS library.

  • 2009-2015 javascript

    Creator and maintainer of Q.js, a UI toolkit for Prototype.js (obsolete).

  • 2009-2012 ruby rails

    Creator and owner of Paspartout, a portfolio website builder for artists and designers (sold in 2012, shut down in 2018).