What I do at UID
I am deputy Program Director for the MFA Programme in Interaction Design and I contribute to the teaching in the different educations at UID.
Research
My research explores what aesthetics refers to in the context of designing digital systems that mediate interactions between people and things.
Talk to me about:
Aesthetics of Interaction, Design Research Practices, Design Theory, Education-Research synergies in Interaction Design.
Aesthetics of being together, Social and ethical implications of communication and interaction media.
Interaction Design Methodologies, Embodied Interaction, Experience Prototyping, Prototyping in the Wild.
(If you really want to get me started on such things, ask me about Argentinian Tango)
Background
I studied Industrial Design Engineering at the Technical University of Delft. I graduated in 2002 on a wearable, tangible social interaction product, in a project largely carried out in the Affective Computing group at the MIT MediaLab in Boston.
I have worked as a strategic, conceptual and technical designer, and have led design and development projects for various interaction and communication products for the consumer market, including several patent applications.
I have taught and coached students and professionals in this field of design in the Netherlands, Norway, Italy, Sweden and Brazil.
I headed the R&D department in a multinational company, where, apart from running product design and innovation projects with an international team, I gained hands-on experience with mass-production systems in western Europe as well as in low-cost labour countries of the time, i.e. China and Mexico.
From 2008-2011 I worked on design projects and workshops, concerning the convergence of fashion products and personal, mobile, consumer electronics.
In 2010 I returned to academia full-time and in 2018 I acquired my PhD degree at Umeå Institute of Design. In 2020 I was promoted to Associate Professor.