It’s being a pretty hectic end/start of the year. As of last Monday (11th of January) I started working as Interaction Designer at VanBerlo Studios, the biggest design studio in the Netherlands and an important player in the European scene of product development.
As a consequence and after 9 years of my life spent in the little and picturesque town of Delft I had to move to Eindhoven, a bigger city down to the south of the Netherlands, very well known for being the headquarters of technology giants Philips and home of former European champions PSV Eindhoven (I guess I can never wear my Ajax jersey in public around this town).
The city is not as charming, but the work and the company is absolutely fantastic so far… and I get to play with robots! One of the first projects I’ll be working on deals with robotics and therefore today I paid a visit to the mechanical engineering department of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). (more…)
For my first post of the year I received the inspiration from a Christmas present my sister received while I was visiting her.
I’ve always had the habit of keeping the little styrofoam packing peanuts of any package I receive so that I can reuse them whenever I have to send something out myself. It saves me money and I ensure that the material is used at least once more. Sadly though, I’m sure that this is not something that everybody does and undoubtedly most of these peanuts end up in the trash after a single use, contributing to our waste problems.
But what’s the alternative? Well, as I mentioned, my sister received this gift during the holidays which I thought was brilliantly simple and a very nicely thought alternative. It was a little box with shower and bath soaps which used POPCORN (!!!) instead of styrofoam. (more…)
I recently discovered the newest version of Sketchbook Pro (2010) and I have to say “oh my freaking god! this is the coolest sketching program ever!”. I absolutely LOVE the simplicity and elegance of the software’s interface and I’m also very grateful that they follow the KISS principle very nicely (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) without cluttering the program with a whole bunch of tools and features that you seldom use.
Just for kicks I made a few sketches to add to my portfolio (pretty sketches sell VERY well on an industrial design portfolio, even if that’s not what you want to focus on) and I was very positively surprised that I still have it a little bit in me to come up with decent results. So here are a few underneath… What do you think? would you hire me??? (more…)
A while back I wrote about the workshop organized by the Design & Emotion Society to celebrate their ten year anniversary, and I said I would make a second post explaining the rest of the workshop and the results… well, after finally making some time to sit down and go through it, here it is!
If you haven’t read the first part, I suggest you do so here, because that will make the coming lines much more clear to understand.
Next Friday (20th of November) a conference called TEDxAmsterdam will take place in… well, in Amsterdam (duh!)
TED as some of you may know, is a very famous yearly conference held in California, which brings together top people from the worlds of Technology, Entertainment & Design. Their TEDtalks are AMAZING to say the least and I’ve featured a few here before (I promise a post in the not so far future with a collection of my very favourites). They are trully Ideas Worth Spreading as their motto goes.
So anyways… TEDx is an initiative of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience and of course, we couldn’t be left outside of the big party here in the Netherlands.
At the TEDxAmsterdam event, TEDtalks videos and live speakers will be combined to spark deep discussions and connections from the local and world communities.
Unfortunately enough, TEDxAmsterdam is an invitation only event so not everybody can attend (yours truly included), but in the true spirit of the original TED (Ideas worth spreading, right???) a live video stream will be sent to various cities in the Netherlands where people can gather to see them in high quality video (a so called simulcast)… and waddaya know??? I’ve taken it upon myself (more…)
There’s a reason why Delft is ranked as the 15th best engineering university in the world, and god, you gotta love them for that!
In Australia, only a crash 3 weeks before the start of the race managed to keep Nuna 5 from being the top dog of the World Solar Challenge so far… After a speedy crash recovery operation, we’re still third by the second day of racing and breathing down the neck of second placed University of Michigan. But watch out Tokai University (leaders so far) ’cause the Nuna team went to Australia to claim their rightful place and beat the competition for the 5th time in a row.
[UPDATE: As of October 27th, Nuna 5 has already surpassed the car from the University of Michigan, so Tokai is next!]
And back in Delft, the Design and Engineering Award is underway with some very, VERY interesting stuff going on.
On this post, you can find a couple of my favourite videos of some of the participating projects from our different faculties, which are just to show off a bit of why Delft is soooo cool (more…)
The welcoming image I found at Helsinki's airport. Don't forget to read the caption
I arrived today to Helsinki, where I’ll be attending and giving a small presentation at the EuroCHRIE 2009 Conference which has “experience in the hospitality and tourism industry” as it’s theme this year. Why am I presenting you say? Well, I’ll be talking about part of what I did during my graduation project and introducing the hospitality industry to Panoremo.
I’ll be posting a bit more about the conference in the coming days.
Unfortunately my hotel room (although very nice, pretty and cozy) does not have a very nice view… in fact all I see is the building on the other side of the street. So I can’t really publish any pics of Helsinki right now, but I did find the picture you see here at the airport which I thought was hilarious.
In case you missed the caption it reads:
“Finns are good at for example driving fast, skiing fast, ice-hockey and curling but we’re pretty good at creating new sports too. Judge yourself: Eukonkanto: Wife Carrying competition through an obstacle course. Saappaanheitto: Throwing a rubber boot. Kannykanheitto: Throwing an old mobile phone. Suopotkupallo: Football on a swamp.”
…I think I’m gonna have a bit of fun in this place
“TEN – 10 years of design and emotion” was a one day workshop held at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering on the 28th of August and luckily I was there to participate. In this post I’ll explain what the workshop was all about and I’ll give a brief explanation of what we did in the first half of the activity. In a later post, I’ll show some of the results that were obtained at the end of the day. (more…)
After a few days visiting my two very cute nieces in France, watching and rediscovering the beauty of Sesame Street with the oldest one (she’s barely 2), not understanding half of what she says to me (she speaks half french and half spanish), having trouble making her go to bed every single night and having her wake me up in the mornings asking me to get out of bed to play with her… I’m all mushy for her, her sister, and anything that has to do with their little world.
So this time I decided to post this very beautiful video that I came across: Andrea Bocelli sings Elmo to sleep! as cute as it gets and it just reminds me of my little Sofia
Some one sent me a link to this very beautiful short movie, which shows some awesome holographic interfaces, and I just had to share it here. Not much more to say, but WATCH IT! it will certainly be worth the 9 minutes of your time.
Today I came across this awesome video, and I just couldn’t wait to share it here. It’s a video made by Jonathan Jarvis explaining the oh so current and oh so cryptical crisis of credit which seems to be affecting everyone of us these days (whether we want it or not). I think it’s a great example of visual communication design at it’s best.
Here’s what Jonathan had to say:
“The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world, visit my website www.Jonathan Jarvis.com”
As a part of my Design for Interaction Master’s degree, I took part of a project called Exploring Interactions, for which I was trying to empower bartenders against unwanted behaviour in their bars.
As a field research, I organized some group interviews with local bartenders and made use of some generative methods (such as collage making) in order to gain more information regarding their context and the interactions involved in their job, specially those regarding the customers and more specifically those involving customers showing some sort of unwanted behaviour. After thorough analysis and fiddling with different ideas, the Beerbuddies were born.
The BeerBuddies are meant as a tool to reflect the personality and mood of bar-goers through the use of beer coasters with cartoon characters on them. (more…)
I dont know if it looked disgusting, weird, ugly, or what… but I found an icon that I assumed was representing a pregnant woman on the floor of the preferential parking space at a local supermarket in Athens, and I couldnt resist the impulse to take a picture of it and save it for posterity.
Apparently it’s in fashion.. everybody seems to be yellow these days. With the whole Simpsons movie, there’s a huge hype going around, and of course, I had to be a part of it.
There’s a site where you can create your own simpsonized version of yourself (www.simpsonizeme.com) so I gave it a try. I was not very satisfied with the results since the options were a bit limited, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and Photoshop it on my own… and voila! I’ve been Simpsonized 2.0!
I'm an industrial designer with a focus on people-product interaction... just trying to share some of the things I know about (and those I would like to know more about).
This website works both as a blog to share my experience with some design methodologies / tools, and as a showcase for some of the projects I've worked on.
You can see an overview of my design portfolio by clicking the link underneath.
It’s being a pretty hectic end/start of the year. As of last Monday (11th of January) I started working as Interaction Designer at VanBerlo Studios, the biggest design studio in the Netherlands and an important player in the European scene of product development.
There’s a reason why Delft is ranked as the 
