Here’s another preview of one of the many photos to select & edit from India & Nepal. With time, they will all be part of an album…
…with (enough) time…
Click on the image for a bigger, better view
A good friend sent me this excellent piece by Krys Hydmore, so I thought I’d share it with everyone & anyone who visits this site.
There is a risk involved in everything
Every time you share a smile
Every time you shed a tear
You are opening yourself up to hurt.Some people tread slowly through life,
Avoiding the closeness risk brings,
Side-stepping the things they can’t understand
Turning away from those who care too much,
Those who care stay too long,
Those who hold too tightly.There is never an easy way to love
You can not approach it cautiously
It will not wait for you to arm yourself.
It does not care if you turn away
It is everywhere, it is everything.Love is the greatest of all risks.
It is not reliable, it is not cautious,
It is not sympathetic
It is unprejudiced and unmerciliess.
It strikes the strongest of mind,
And brings them to their knees in one blow.
A group of selected photos from my recent “India/Nepal” trip will be making its way to Facebook and Flickr soon.
Here’s a sample of what is to come:
(Click on it — it’ll look better…)
Not exactly a new year, but you get my point.
I am writing this only hours before I stop officially living in New York.
Destination: The self-proclaimed “Live Music Capital of The World”
NYC: Past & Present
It has been only six months ago since I loaded most of my clothes and my laptop in a mini van and drove all the way from Indianapolis to New York to start a new job (and a new life) in a city I had always wanted to live in.
A year after graduating from my Masters in HCI at Indiana University and after almost 4 years of working as an Interaction Designer at Pearson Education, I came to New York to work as a User Experience Designer in a agency –more as consultant instead of “in house” designer.
The experience was… interesting…
It is a true honour to finally be part of the long & brilliant list of contributor to UX Magazine: an online publication focused on highlighting numerous topics from various fields –all revolving around the field of User Experience Design.
The UX Mag article is based on the mixed-fidelity prototyping technique I developed as part of my HCI Masters thesis at Indiana University: “Paper in Screen” Prototyping.
I say it was was “a long time coming” because this article was meant to be published a couple of months ago, but moving to NYC, starting a new job and going to a few UX/IxD conferences here and there certainly delayed its release.
Back when Dr. Davide Bolchini, Dr. Anthony Faiola and I had our “Paper in Screen” Prototyping article published in ACM’s Interactions Magazine, we had just proposed the idea behind the technique. The new approach to (mobile) prototyping was made by practitioners, for practitioners. It even offers the the steps to implement the technique, but it was lacking any of the testing results or conclusions I gathered once I completed my graduate thesis.
UX Magazine has now given me the opportunity to share those results with the rest of the UX community. After testing the technique with practitioners and a long affinity diagramming session, it was discovered that although the newly proposed technique managed to enhance the mobile user experience of simple low-fidelity prototypes, it was slightly more difficult to achieve (when compared to high-fidelity prototypes).
The following graph clearly shows where “Paper in Screen” Prototyping is located when compared to low and high fidelity prototypes:
This is how some locals call the city of Columbus, Ohio.
“C-bus” is also where I’ve just come from, after attending the firs-ever Midwest UX conference.
It was a great, very-well organized & executed conference in the User Experience Design field. The first primarily made by and for people of the Midwest of the US.
I’m really glad to have been able to attend –not only given the great line-up of presenters, talks and workshops but also because I do know (for a fact) that I got the second-to-last ticket before it sold out.
I’m looking forward to expand on my experience during Midwest UX, but for now, I’leave you with this Hellenic monument we (Brad Nunnally, David Farkas, Jake Truemper & I) found on our way to the first day of the conference.
Another February. Another Interaction conference that came and went.
I was very lucky to be able to experience my second Interaction conference, held this time in beautiful Boulder, Colorado (US)
I’ll be writing about my experiences at this enlightening conference soon. For now, I leave you with this beautiful shot I took with my iPhone, from my room at the St.Julien Hotel.
Update: An iPad-related calamity has made me lost ALL the notes I had taken with the Notes Plus iPad application during the conference!
I love the app & will be reviewing it sometime soon on Taskflo.ws. Unfortunately, this had something to do with my MacBookPro’s mother board + hard drive failing and updating my iPad to the latest iOS version without backing up the latest contents first.
I’d like to make a personal collection of memories & experiences during this great event, but it may be lighter in content than I originally intended. My notes to make it more interesting are gone.
Why I didn’t back up my notes on Evernote during the conference,I don’t understand.
Lesson learned.
Feliz año nuevo a todos! (happy new year, everyone).
2011 will bring heaps of new changes to my life (among which “blogging” more here and there will be one of them), but most importantly, I will be starting the new year with a new job and a new home.
A new life. In New York.
After 5 1/2 years in Indianapolis (which has been “home” to me ever since I left Torino), the time has come for me to turn yet another page in my life –personally and professionally.
I will be working as a User Experience Designer at Roundarch in New York City from the 17th of January.
My plan was never to come and stay in the American Midwest for so long. In fact, I came here just to visit my sister during the summer before returning to Bogotá after completing my undergraduate degree at UNR –ready to think about the future.
But shortly after I came to Indy, I found myself enrolling in a great Human-Computer Interaction graduate programme at Indiana University. Shortly after (halfway through my graduate studies), I was given a fantastic work opportunity as an Interaction Designer at Pearson Education.
I feel very lucky. Not many people get a chance to complete a graduate degree at the same time they work in a real full-time job in the real world. Being able to handle both successfully until I finally graduated had me feeling accomplished like never before in my life.
Needless to say, this was a rather intense, yet very rewarding experience.
I am extremely grateful to Davide Bolchini and Anthony Faiola for guiding me throughout my graduate studies in HCI. I am also extremely grateful to Pearson Education for believing in me and my potential as an interaction designer, despite only being a graduate student trying to achieve the credentials to be worthy of such a position.
It is safe to say that being in Indy all this time has prepared me to take the next big step in my life –a step like the one I’m about to take.
I’m moving from designing optimal user experiences in the world of higher education to Roundarch: a digital consulting company in which I will have the opportunity to design for a much wider spectrum of audiences, platforms and contexts.
After nearly 4 years as an interaction/UX designer at Pearson Education, I am really happy to be able to expand my horizons in a brand new setting, working at a different (faster) pace in all sorts of new projects with Roundarch. I’m ready to give this new episode of my professional life my all and get the most out of it at the same time.
I will also take this opportunity to write more openly (and more often) about how this new adventure develops –right here on this site. I’m sure this change will come with plenty of stories to share.
Making New York City my new home has indeed been a long and intense process. Most of my energy in the past two months has gone to finding a place to live, flying back and forth between Indy and NYC, talking to various friends and colleagues about the UX field in the city, getting a sense of NYC’s cost of living, culture…among many other things.
But now that things are starting to come full circle in regards to this move, I must say that I could not have made it without the help and assistance from my family, as well as many people I have the honour of calling my friends: Cindy Gerritsen, Chris Avore, Eduardo Ortiz, Whitney Hess, Will Evans, Amanda Chessa, Kelly Elsner, Shawn Hoke, Kate Nyland <–you all know in what ways and just how much you have contributed to making this goal of mine a reality. From the bottom of my heart: Muchas Gracias!
I’m about to welcome a 2011 full of new experiences and adventures. One where there will be many things to learn and explore –in other words, a new year that seems to be very, very exciting.
I wish you (reading this right now) a very exciting new year as well.
Thank you for sharing this moment with me. See you in NYC! ^_^
Taking photos at concerts (or when traveling) is the fun and easy part.
Selecting the best ones, editing & retouching them takes a considerable amount of time and effort –but when they are ready to be published for the world to see, it’s all worth it.
These took over 2 months after I first took them, but they’re finally up for anyone who wants to get a taste of this year’s Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago, IL (US).
Here is the first day in photos:
The Flickr sets of the other two days of Lollapalooza 2010 are below (after the jump).
Enjoy.
Another excellent show. Another set of videos captured by yours truly for posterity.
This is a concert I’ve been wanted to see for over 12 years.
The Chemical Brothers‘ live show is really elaborate. The visualizations are truly amazing. I hope these videos I’ve recorded capture some of that essence.
Here’s “Horse Power” from their latest album, Further. The animation of the horse in front of the stage lights give it an almost 3D-like effect. Brilliant!
But one of the things I came out with from this show was the quality of the camera on the iPhone 4 –especially when it comes to video. This was my first time recording at a live show with the iPhone 4. I was almost as blown away by the image and audio quality from the new iPhone as I was by the show itself.
Watch this short clip I took of “Another World”. Compared to the video above (recorded with a Sony DSC-T900), the audio is not saturated when exposed to heavy bass and the image has very little to envy my Sony’s “HD” quality.
The only thing missing from the iPhone 4′s video camera is to allows for zooming in and out whilst recording. Besides that, if you have an iPhone 4, you already have one of the best photo/video cameras available today. In your phone!
I don’t mean to sound like an Apple fanboy, but this thing just keeps getting closer to being truly “magical”.
Watch the rest of my Chemical Brothers videos from “North Coast Music Festival” in Chicago after the jump.
Enjoy.