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…)
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…)
Last Friday (Sept. 25th), I attended the Symposium Advanced Automotive Design organized at the TU Delft as part of the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the Industrial Design Faculty. It was a very nice event in which top designers from the automotive industry (all of them TU Delft alumni) shared a bit of their work and experience as designers for these well known firms as well as giving us their view of the future of automotive design.
The keynote speakers were Fedde Talsma (Exterior Chief Designer at Volvo), Adrian van Hooydonk (Design Director at BMW) and Lowie Vermeersch (Design Director at Pininfarina) who were asked to choose a fragment of a movie as introduction to their talk. We also enjoyed shorter presentations by other TU Delft designers working for Ducati, Alfa-Romeo, DAF, Mercedes and Audi. (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
The World Solar Challenge is a renowned solar-powered car race run every 2 years since 1987 through the Australian outback with participants from all over the world. The TU Delft has been participating and winning every single event (kicking ass I may add) since 2001 with their car, Nuna.
This coming October the prestigious race will be ran again and this year’s team from the TU has a big responsibility on their shoulders to try and win their 5th consecutive event. The team is already in Australia preparing for the big event and in the mean time I wanted to post a collection of cool videos from this years Nuna 5.
Good luck to them, and I hope that they bring a new title back home!
The mayor of Bogota has just released this new video to promote the construction of the ‘Metro de Bogotá’. It’s kind’a cool and gives a nice overview of the design of the first line of Bogota’s metro which should in theory be constructed in the coming years.
I’ve always thought that Bogota has been left behind in the stone age of mobility by not having some sort of rail solution operating. There have been many attempts to design and put in motion it’s construction since as early as the 1950’s, and millions have been spent by different local administrations over the years in viability studies and early designs for the metro grid.
This time however, it seems that they actually mean to take it to the next level and build the damn thing after all. But a big question arises: is this really what Bogota needs? (more…)
Various methods are available for measuring emotional responses elicited by products (design) or human-product interaction. Up to this point however, no instrument was available that could be used to assess emotional service experiences. The aim of the project was to extend the possibilities of assessing emotions to the realm of experiential service design. As a case study for the project, the focus was laid on the `hotel experience’, that is, the experience of a guest while staying at a hotel.
Project duration:
5 months (full time)
Methods Used:
Thorough literature research to become acquainted with the project domain.
Online survey to identify the most common types of emotions experienced by hotel guests and the stimuli associated with these experiences.
Creative session organized with a panel of users and designers to generate ideas.
Early prototyping to perform user testing of concepts.
Creation of wire-frames and navigation flow-charts to define the software’s architecture.
So… it’s been a little over a week since I did the presentation for my Design for Interaction MSc. graduation project (Developing a tool to assess emotions elicited by services), and since I went off on a short one week vacation right after that, I didn’t have the time to post the video and some photos of the presentation during that time.
But as I promised some people, today I finally got back and had some spare time to upload everything. So above,you can take a look at the video of the presentation (takes about 45 minutes including the questions round). The file is quite big (around 500 Mb) because I couldn’t (more…)
I’ve been quite busy the last few weeks working on my MSc. graduation project, and so I haven’t had much time to do any new updates here, but since a while ago I found out that one of the projects I worked on had been published on the website of the European Commission for Transport, I figured that was worth a mention.
As I’ve showed in previous posts, I worked together with a group of colleagues in a project developing a new concept for delivery trucks of the future. My posts were focusing mainly on the application of the Vision in Product Design approach (ViP), which was just but a part of the project.
Later in the process, this vision and future product which we had designed was translated into a product that could be introduced to the market in the near future and it had a strong relation to the Civitas initiative sponsored by the European Union (more…)
I’ve already made a post before talking about the Personal Area Libraries, one of our concepts in our attempt to design the books and libraries of the future. Today it’s time to show our second concept, the Tokens. You can see the results of our initial research by visiting the previous post so that you can understand why we came up with this concept, but in the mean time and just to give you an idea, here’s the vision we developed as a starting point:
“In a world full of volatile digital media, people feel distant and unconnected from their reading material. It’s so easy to copy and distribute media that its very possession has lost its value.
We want to bring this value back to the people.”
So here it goes:
THE READING MATERIAL:
The reading material is independent of the eReader itself. It is carried individually (more…)
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.
As part of a project for the TU Delft and together with my good friends Job Greefhorst and Amine Rhord, we set out to design the books and libraries of the future. We followed some context mapping techniques to understand the domain of reading in general as a first step for our process. I will explain the process in a later post, as it was quite interesting and it will give me a chance to explain some of these context mapping techniques in greater detail, but in the mean time, I’ll just stick to the results of our research which are more than plenty for a single post, and of course I will show you one of the two concepts that we came up with (the other one will also come on a later post).
So let’s get started…
THE READING DOMAIN CONTEXT
We wanted to know what people thought of their books, how they stored them, why they liked them, why they (more…)
I’ve talked before about the Virtual Goals project that I worked on a few months back, and in this post I’d like to talk a bit more about one of the techniques that we used during the project: Wizard of Oz prototyping
This technique (named of course after the famous book by L. Frank Baum) is in my opinion one of the most powerful ways of experimenting and developing user interfaces dealing with smart systems, because it allows you to test even when there is no smart system to start with!
The idea is fairly simple: you make a prototype in which all of the actions which will eventually be attributed to the computer system are actually performed by a person.
Let’s illustrate with an example; let’s say you want to make a system that recognizes (more…)
Combigroep Carrosserieën, a Dutch coachworks producer, wants to extend its potential market following the newest regulations, transportation trends and logistics of the European Union having sustainability as a focus. As a group of 6 interdisciplinary designers the project was carried out from the strategy up to the product interaction and product detail level.
Project duration and team:
300 hours, 2 Strategic product designers (Stefanus Heru Prabowo, Ricardo Mejia), 3 Integral product designers (Barth Vrijling, Ana Laura Rodrigues Santos, Marjolein van Houten), 1 Interaction designer (David Güiza Caicedo).
The context of the industry and our clients position within it was researched and analyzed through stakeholder analysis, competitor analysis and PESTE analysis
Interviews and role playing user analysis were used to understand our users and personas were used to illustrate them during the design process.
Generated future scenarios
Creative sessions were performed to generate ideas during the design process.
I came across this video the other day, and thought that it would be interesting to publish it here too. It’s a look at Bogota (Colombia), my home town, and it’s current developments from a sustainability perspective.
The video itself is quite interesting and it portrays the work done on the city during the past decade and how it is meant to boost Bogota towards a more sustainable future. Having experienced the city and the new infrastructure first hand, I can honestly say that the video is a bit idealized, and that not everything is as pretty (more…)
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 
