This is where the Vostok crew blogs
Articles clasified as "People"
Go back to the homepageNow this is a nice proposal (Spanish) for a search engine redesign by Yusef Hassan:
Where Search does a “classic search”, Re-find looks on what I already have seen (and starts digging on my social info up in the cloud) and Discover does te opposite bringing results I’ve never seen before.
It makes sense to me, ¿Does it to you?
Kanya Hara, art director of Muji, explains Japanese design taking knives as an example:
Japanese cooks who have special skills prefer knives without any ergonomic shape. A flat handle is not seen as raw or poorly crafted. On the contrary, its perfect plainness is meant to say, “You can use me whichever way suits your skills.” The Japanese knife adapts to the cook’s skill (not to the cook’s thumb). This is, in a nutshell, Japanese simplicity.
The piece, translated by Oliver Reichenstein is also part of a larger article about Japanese aesthetics published at the NYTimes under the title Beauty and the Bento Box where also John Maeda, Nick Currie and Denis Dutton go through the subject.
Worth reading.
Juan Leal is on a travel trip in Helsinki. He is using his blog to document his observations and meetings with interesting people in the interaction design field. That is what he calls Helsingfors Series, definitely worth reading.
Spain.rb: they are the elite of Rails development in Spain, they are proficient in English and I am sure they can kick some asses when it comes to writing elegant code and beign agile at the same time.
Check out the great work by Joan Pons Moll, a graphic designer from Menorca. Some of his logos are just brilliant:
At Vostok we have added another cosmonaut to the crew, María Munuera. María is no stranger to Vostok, as she had been doing a great job working part-time for Planetaki.
María, a Journalist by formation (jack-of-all-trades in practice) brings serious communication and organization skills to the table, plus some design fire power for the ultra-cool projects lining up at Vostok for 2009. María lived two years in Turin, and speaks fluent Italian. She also claims to make a mean tiramisu. This, however, has not been personally verified by the rest of the team (hint hint).
Despite looking and acting vampirishly dark, María is the sunshine of the office. She has geeky sense of humor, and will laugh at almost any joke you make, no matter how dorky and stupid. Or probably she is just being condescending with us. In any case, we are extremely pleased to have a great talent and personality at the office.
Mark MacKay is officially a member of Vostok. He joined us a few days ago and is currently involved in several ultracool projects we are working on right now. It’s good news for me, since I’ve wanted to hire him for some time now but he seemed to prefer the warm lattitudes of Cancún. Besides, he is a weirdo and I have a secret crush for that type.
Mark is half Canadian half Mexican (bilingual), he holds a degree in Information Design (something pretty rare) and has a very good eye for design (you can see that from the picture). His Spanish blog (Duopixel) is probably one of the best I know when it comes to design, although he will never mention it.
Welcome aboard the Vostok spaceship!
César Astudillo is blogging again, which is good news, but the very good news is that he’s doing so in English. I bet he’ll get big recognition soon, because his posts are so insightful and inspirational that many people will start following him in days.
He recently blogged about recombination and heat stoves. He described the technique with an extremely creative excercise of imagining the stove of the near future
A real must if you are into good interaction design reading.
I would say that Agustin Jiménez’s was the best talk we had at our recent “Desconferencia” (a gathering of professionals where everybody gives a small presentation).
He enlightened us on the convergence point between interaction design and biotechnology. The main point was that biological systems are being created with more and more levels of abstraction and that one day in the near future designers will be needed to determine how these systems will be used by people. The fact that DNA sequences and machine code have a very similar structure (I am simplifying here, I know) leads to the building of new levels of abstraction just as we did on machine code, making it possible to design biosystems that have sensory interfaces a person could interact with:
Have you ever think about a cell as a machine?. They really behave like it whether they are yeast or pluripotent cells in your bone marrow. In fact, as Drew Endy define them, they act as computational systems. They receive inputs, and behave accordingly as outputs. Cells have measurements tools, priorities to satisfy and self awareness of different kinds.
As interaction designers we can apply all the inherited knowledge in our discipline to new horizons like biotech. It’s just a new framework with new variables.
Agustín Jiménez is an interaction designer who always has one foot at the side of technology and another one on the biomedical edge. His post on the talk: Biotechnology and Interaction Design is worth a relaxed reading.
This friday we had the last class of Programa Vostok’s second course on interaction design (esp) (Madrid). The six “cosmonauts” and I did some rapid prototyping for a nice project we have, we also discussed on professional expectations, had a great dinner and some soft partying at the most amazing terrace in town. Here is a picture of the Madrid crew;)
As some of you know, the course took place during these last six months both in Madrid and Barcelona. Ariel Guersenzvaig, professor in Barcelona, wrote a post summarizing the experience. It’s worth a look if you are interested in the course and live around that city or plan to be there next year.
I have to say that I am very happy with the results for the Madrid crew too. We now have a group of six cosmonauts who have been trained in many issues, almost all of them on the list of subjects (esp-pdf) anounced and on many more.
This year we had some talks by invited people:
Pretty intense, yeah!
This is my second year teaching the course. Now I see that each course gets to be unique in its own way. Students are different (this year there was less homogeneity), I am motivated with different subjects and of course I get better at explaining some things compared to last year but some others get worse. I’d prefer some variability over making something scriptized and completely predictable. It’s more fun this way.
All 12 students (6 in Madrid and 6 in Barcelona) are now professionals who can face most of the usual tasks an interaction designer does on his professional life. They’ve seen many examples (good and bad) and they’ve done a lot of work by themselves. Even some of the projects they started may become reality soon (stay tuned to Projekt Bahnhof).
That makes a total of 17 great professionals who will always be part of Vostok. I feel very proud of them.
Congratulations, especially to the new ones!
