Diego Pulido

I’ve *just* come back from running with 2 UX mates this morning, so I haven’t got time to do a decently-sized brief of what occurred yesterday during the first day of Interaction 10. Needless to say, it was enlightening, intense and exciting.

I’m sure I’ll share some more thoughts later. For now, leave you with this video I caught of myself playing with Microsoft’s Surface last night. It was running a game in which a song plays and players have to flip over album covers whilst the music is playing. Once you find the album cover of the song playing, you need to bring the cover to where you are to win points:

What i didn’t know is that the game (actually, the people) can get quite vicious whilst playing, so injuries can do happen:

At this point, I may just write a compelling, redUX version of what I took from the talks –the conference ends tomorrow. It has been everything I expected and more. I’d say the conference paid for itself thanks to mini-quiches and almond-chocolate ice cream baskets, but the knowledge being shared here is priceless.

If you are staying at the Planters Inn (in Savannah), you know you’ve got to go to the lobby of the hotel, the mezzanine, or even sit down in the hallway of your floor to get any wifi signal for your computer or phone (like I had to at 1 a.m. on Wednesday when I arrived here)

Sadly, I’m not the only one…

So you probably know where I am right now.

In other news…

The first day of Interaction 10 (for me –and many others) was a really productive/active one. It was a day full of workshops –and these were really hands on. Brilliant.

First, I attended Dan Saffer’s “Brainstorming and Design Principles” workshop. There wasn’t a gap of more than 15-20 minutes talking before we were doing some brainstorming exercise or activity throughout the entire workshop, which was great. Personally, I never thought of brainstorming as something that could be done in so many different ways. The brainstorming and design principles I’ve learned about here can (and should) be very well applicable  in my everyday work –and beyond.

I’ll post a link to Dan’s slides whenever I find them. A resource not to be missed, no matter what you do.

The second workshop of the day was “The Right Way to Wireframe” by Russ Unger, Will Evans, Fred Beecher & Todd Zaki Warfel. Turns out, there really is not a “right” way to wireframe, but what I found most interesting about this workshop was to see how the same project (designing a particular website) was tackled from four different design perspectives. They all shared some common themes (Site maps, sketches, wireframes, prototypes), but each approach was unique and I learned quite a bit from all four. This workshop was also really hands-on. The facilitators divided the crowd into various  design”weapons of choice” (e.g. Fireworks, OmniGraffle, Balsamiq) and made us go from preliminary sketching to actually taking out our laptops (I’m glad I’ve brought mine) and actually making some wireframes that would later be presented to the group for critique.

Unfortunately, there was some sort of “Happy Hour” going on whilst we were still trying to mass-produce wireframes against the clock. Gladly, in Interaction 10, if you don’t go to the beer, the beer comes to you:

Those of you going to SXSW this year will have the chance to experience this workshop, divided as one pre and one post-lunch sessions. I highly recommend this workshop for any of you who wants to know where they stand in regards to wireframing in design and wish to discover what could change or improve (Fat Tire not included). It certainly served that purposed for me.

All right, I’m off to experience the first full day of talks & sessions. There’s loads to learn today.

Ciao from the land of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil“

As of nearly midnight last night, I’ve arrived in Savannah, GA for Interaction 10 (No sign of John Cusack or Kevin Spacey yet).

I’m currently staying at the Planters Inn. So far, a rather average hotel (except they’ve managed to give me the *one* room where the free WiFi does NOT work –so I’m writing this from the lobby). Unfortunately, I haven’t got time to complain (nor I’m willing to pay nearly double the rates I am now for a different hotel).

In any case, today should be really interesting. It’s going to be a day of workshops: one in the morning and another one in the afternoon.

More from southern lands soon –now, off to try and find if there’s any source of Lavazza in Savannah.

In the past month or so, I have taken industrial amounts of photos. This is due to my recent trips to Portugal (right before the new year) and Bogotá (Colombia) immediately after.

I’ve had the chance to acquire a great DSLr for the first time, and this is the first set that sees the light of day from all that Trans-Atlantic/Trans-American traveling: Lisbon.

The idea behind the Portugal trip came after about an hour-long gTalk conversation with my good friend (and photographer extraordinaire) Willie Morris. We studied together in Torino (Italy) back in 2005 and we’ve been mates ever since. We thought about it, decided, looked for tickets and planned our arrival –everything in more or less that time frame.

The trip was indeed a refreshing experience for me. I recently completed my much anticipated M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction from Indiana University and I was ready for a break from it all… and what better way than to relive my days of being a student backpacking around Europe with someone who knows exactly how that feels like?

Willie did, in fact, keep a very comprehensive account of our entire trip and shared it all on his web site (I’m talking plenty of stories, photos and HD video about it all). You can head over to his blog and relieve it all again.

As I previously mentioned, Willie is rather knowledgeable in the world of (serious) photography. This is why I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to learn how to take decent photos with a proper DSLr camera from someone who already knows how to and does it very well. After all, having the chance to learn from someone directly is something I’ll always favour (over reading books or even watching instructional videos).

What you see here is the shortlist of the hundreds of photos I took in Lisbon alone. You can enjoy it by going through the embedded slide show –but I would recommend you experience it in full, directly via Flickr.

Soon, you will see the rest of the sets displayed here. I will try to speed up the rigorous selection process every photo has to through so they can be Flickrd up to the “series of tubes” before I depart to southern North American lands for Interaction 10.

I hope you enjoy taking a look at these photos (as well as the ones to come). I´ve certainly enjoyed capturing every single moment.

…the iPad.

Taken from the Baltimore Sun: http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/technology/2010/01/apple_ipad_pros_cons.html

A couple of days back I wrote a little something about it over at TaskFlo.ws

It’s just my take –just like any other blog of anyone concerned and/or passionate about Apple’s latest and greatest.

As part of my defence presentation for my Master’s thesis project, I was required to make a short demo on video showing how this new proposed prototyping technique called “Paper in Screen” works during a usability test.

This video is made to fit within an already-tight 30 minutes long presentation (taking place this coming Thursday, 3 December, 2009). So, if the voice-over appears to be a little “rushed”, it’s because the video that was originally meant to be only 30 seconds long, could only be made in 2:01 min. (for it to at least make *some* sense).

This brings my thesis project practically to an end –pending a few extra revisions of the final document and a couple of much needed rehearsals of the presentation itself. Hopefully it will all come to a nice, smooth end soon.

Thank you for watching.

That’s it — in a nutshell.

More Later ^_^

I’ve stopped bouncing from airport to airport (lately DTW, YYZ, ORD, CLT, MIA, to be exact), but things have not slowed down for yours truly lately.

Hence the gaps between posts.

Lately, I have:

• Gone to Toronto for Ideǝ 2009.

• Gone to Miami for Pearson’s Course Redesign conference

• Working on my Msc in HCI thesis non-stop –nearly as a second full time job.

• Working… at work.

• Sleeping Resting –whenever possible.

Team “Paper-in-Screen” (a.k.a. D.Bolchini, A.Faiola, D.Pulido) are also waiting on confirmation from CHI 2010 in regards to the paper/poster we’ve submitted. We should know if it is accepted sometime soon.

All my efforts (spare time), specially during the next 2-3 weeks are going to nothing but finishing the write-up of the thesis project. After that, it’s presentation design, defense, and hopefully, graduation from what has been a rather interesting and may I say, life-shaping experience at IUPUI.

Until then… Ciao! –and like my friend MJK says, “See you on the other side“…

Apparently I was one of the many cutting it very close near the deadline when submitting a presentation to Interaction 10, which takes place on 4-7 February of 2010.

At first it appeared as if my effort had been in vain –my application didn’t appear on the site. (At this point I was ready to blame the Google Docs form being used for the failure) Gladly, I was told it would eventually appear, and it did.

So what is my submission, you might be asking? “Paper-in-Screen“! I reckon if it is good enough for Interactions Magazine, others in the interaction design community might find it useful, or at least somewhat interesting –or both.

I’ve made a short video explaining the idea behind the prototyping technique:

As I’ve mentioned, the submission is up –which means it’s there begging asking for you to comment on it and voice your opinion on the technique, as well as express whether it is something you and others would like to see as a presentation in this conference.

A more in-depth explanation on Paper-in-Screen can be found in the July-August issue of ACM’s Interactions Magazine, or in one my previous post on this site.

Thanks a mil.

Sure, I would have liked to be in Toronto somewhat earlier to see a select number of great films at this year’s International Film Festival, but I am nonetheless extremely happy to be able to attend the Idea 2009 conference from the 14th to the 16th of September.

A conference about social and experience design? A meet-up with great speakers discussing new and engaging way humans can interact with systems, computers, and of course, with each other? Clearly a no-brainer for someone interested in HCI and Interaction Design like me. I’m there.

Besides, I’ve never been to Toronto. I hear it’s the “New York City” of Canada. (Is it?)

In the past I’ve had the chance to attend similar conferences, such as Voices That Matter Web Design conference in 2008, and more recently a combined 1-day version of IxDA Interaction 09 + IA Summit 2009, appropriately named RedUX DC. Needless to say, I love the chance of being in the middle of a highly-concentrated environment full of creative minds –all sharing how and why design is one of our passions.

Idea 2009 will start with a full day workshop called “Modular User Experience Design and Deliverables”. I’m particularly interested in how to create UX-pattern libraries, which seems to be one of the many things we will be learning in between lectures, discussions and actively building different types of UX deliverables.

The next two days will be full of talks touching on everything from designing social experiences, social models, open-source design and social design patterns –among many others. There’s one that particularly caught my attention just by reading the title: “The Art and Science of Seductive Interactions” by Stephen Anderson (there must be a reason why this is the last session of the conference.)

I sure hope to learn a lot at this conference; say hello to a couple of “Tweeple” I’ve met before; and certainly meet new speakers/attendants at this interesting event.

And of course, provided I wake up early enough one of these 3 days, I may just manage to add a quick run along Lake Ontario’s shore.