Diego Pulido

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.

I’m proud to announce that the current topic of my Master’s thesis at IUPUI’s HCI programme, has been published as an article in the current issue of Interactions magazine.

The article was co-authored between my thesis adviser, Dr. Davide Bolchini and myself, under the supervision of Dr. Anthony Faiola, executive associate dean of the school of informatics at IUPUI.

The topic? It’s about mobile user experience. More specifically, it’s about how to anticipate it with the help of simple paper prototyping –a familiar concept to most practitioners in the fields of interaction design and usability.

“Paper-in-Screen” in itself is a prototyping technique that allows practitioners to anticipate the mobile user experience without the need to create high-fidelity, interactive prototypes (which are generally time/resource-consuming).

The origins of this prototyping technique were within one of my independent studies from the past Autumn semester at IUPUI. Dr. Bolchini gave me the freedom to work on any design-related project of my liking. With “mobile interaction design” being one of my most salient interests, I decided to design an application for the Apple iPhone. That application is called Vertsumption.

In the process of prototyping the application, we discovered (practically by accident) the ability to anticipate certain aspects of the mobile user experience that otherwise, would have required a couple of lines of code and some time with Adobe Fireworks.

I will go into more detail about the technique itself and the results from testing it with practitioners when I’m finished with my thesis project (the topic is the same as the article). I still need to do some more affinity diagramming with the obtained results for it all to come full circle.

If you are a subscriber of Interactions magazine, you shall see the July-August issue soon in your post box. The article is also available in PDF format at ACM’s Portal web site.

I’m really glad to see this article in a publication like Interactions. I consider it the “norm” for people in my professional field. It is an honour in itself to be featured in the same magazine where Don Norman has a regular column.

If you are a practitioner in UX/IxD, I hope you find it useful, but regardless of your field of expertise, I hope you find it interesting.

Opportunities like this don’t come up very often.

So far, I haven’t had the chance to attend two of the most important conferences related to user experience and interaction design. (a.k.a Interaction 09 in Vancouver and IA Summit 09 in Memphis)

Gladly, some of the speakers from both of this conferences will be in Washington, DC to offer a “lite” version of those conferences –and it’s called RedUX DC

Considering that conferences of this sort are generally hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars; a $5 dollar fee at the door seems beyond a steal. The flight from Indianapolis wasn’t even close in price to some of these conferences.

It’s only from around mid day until 7 pm…but again: it’s a great chance to meet some of the most relevant people in the field –as well as a chance to the U.S capital to catch up with old friends and get a breathe of fresh air from the Indy routine.

I hope to meet many of you IxDers and UxDers at RedUX DC!

Welcome (back)

This is the new look of my personal web site and portfolio. It more dynamic, you get to see my latest status updates on Twitter and yes… you can comment in my post if you wish to do so.

(Welcome to 2004!)

Old visitors may remember something more or less like this:

Good bye, static XHTML.

A lot of work has gone into the design of the look and feel for this new web site. I worked on it regularly at diegopulido.info whilst keeping diegopulido.com looking… exactly as the image above.

I’m glad to finally see it live. I’m glad you can see it too.

Look for interesting posts on the blog and more aditions to the recently updated Portfolio area, as they come to life.

Thank you for stopping by.