Maya sin fronteras is a local free publication, distributed monthly in my hometown Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo since December 2005, with a team 12 writers and a photographer.

As an art director my main goal is to take care of transmitting only local aesthetics, leaving out all the current stereotypes that populate mexican massive media. Most of the graphics are related with patterns that populate the local landscape in F. Carrillo Puerto and mayan culture.

The subjects of this publication are mainly local political issues, women rights, health & education systems issues, amongst others. What I consider the main value of this publication is that most of the content is produced by the community.

Since February 2009 we undertook the challenge of taking maya sin fronteras to the digital world in order to get use of the multimedia capabilities that this medium offer.

My main tasks where helping the business development team regarding functionality that could be implemented on other social networks as well as working on device partnerships and taking care of festival campaigns.

I had the chance to be working with the website redesign and to collaborate on the functionality requirements for the events pages.

I worked on the information and interface design for a digital signage system that streams relevant information and entertainment content to a transitory audience in Canadian corporate buildings.

Brief
To design a suitable interface and weather forecast icons for a digital signage system.

Role
Interface Design

Target Audience
Business men and employees in Canadian Corporate Buildings.
(High traffic spaces, elevators and waiting rooms)

Outcome
12 Icons set for weather forecast
• Portraying all the variations from the Canadian Forecast System.
• Different from the standard canadian forecast mainstream icons.
• Two states, current and future.

Screen Interface with 4 Display Components.
• Weather Forecast
• Stock Market
• RSS Canadian Press Section
• Entertainment Sections (After Effects)

Audioguide for backpackers and an urban game for locals, which facilitates them to meet each other and to see different areas of the city besides the traditional touristic. It is set in such a way that it will try to entertain them at the same time that will help them to break the ice and perhaps to make new friends.

Brief: Develop a product that encourages physical interaction and helps to accomplish
different target audiences goals in to a single activity.

Role: Interaction Designer, I did task diagrams for the user, and worked with the Interface Designer (Da-wei) and the Usability Tester (June) in order to improve the website. We had the need to find a programmer that could work under our budget, thanks to June and Li-hua who talk to a friend of them in china and Da-wei who translated and arrange the diagrams for him to work on the databases.

Team: Sheng-wen (Taiwan), June (China), Siddhi (Spain), Da-wei (Taiwan), Marcela (me). This is the blog we used during the project development,which became our most useful tool.

Target Audience: Lonely backpackers and Londoners (20-34 years old).

Outcome: We developed an interactive audioguide that showed the area through a non-linear narrative, the audioguide was produce in such a way the encourage the people to interact with each other.
In order for the participants to have access to the audioguide and follow the different game throughout London we developed a social network where there could be automatic alert of new events as well as share pictures and keep contact with the people they’ve meet in it.

The now called “Ethical Consumers”, when most of this consumer trends have origin in the UK, one of the most powerful economies in the world, the acquisition power of British market is difficult to compare to other countries. Therefore they are one of the most critical on their choices. I have to admit that money is not the only reason they can afford to be so picky about the items they consume, but also, higher levels of education, better access to new media and the heavy impact imported goods have in their lives.

Imported and non imported goods are subject of British awareness, many of the organic, green, fair trade and other trends become quite successful out of the fear most people get from certain issues as the “mad cows” disease, or the now very popular “carbon campaigns”.

The United Kingdom is a country where most of its goods are imported, the consumption levels in cities such as London are increasing year by year, as an example the National Statistics Survey (2005-2006) mentioned an average of £434 expended weekly in UK households in the 2004-05 period followed for £443 the next year period.

Since more than ten years ago, organic food and fair-trade products are part of the supermarket landscape, as the time passes new issues come to the scene when consumers become more aware about the impact of their choices. The rise of new issues related with consumerism besides the easier access of information give birth to this new type of segment now called, Ethical Consumers, as Harrison explains, this kind of consumers are the ones that:

“…may have political, religious, spiritual, environmental, social or other motives for choosing one product over another, the one thinking they have in common is that they are concerned with the effects that a purchasing choice has, not only on themselves, but also on the external world around them.”

Also UK press has put their attention on this growing community of buyers and the Guardian Unlimited specially describes it as:

“Being an ethical consumer means buying products which were ethically produced and/or which are not harmful to the environment and society. This can be as simple as buying free-range eggs or as complex as boycotting goods produced by child labor. Products which fall into the ethical category include organic produce, fair trade goods, energy-efficient light bulbs, electricity from renewable energy, recycled paper and wood products with Forest Stewardship Council approval.” Guardian Unlimited on Ethical consumption.

As mentioned before ethical consumption is a phenomena that encloses many different types of consumption ideologies but that shares a goal and tools to function, this definition mostly came after the awareness that consumption is a very complex system that involves many different issues in the world, and that many of this issues are correlated, most of the organizations that are involved with this new category believe that is important to recognize this situation in order to make a stronger impact on each purchase decision, also came out of the self-knowledge of the power of the consumer.

Note:

I am very pleased to participate at the Visualizar Symposium presenting the topic “Information Tools for Ethical Consumers” which was part of my MA dissertation at LCC.

I have always being attentive at Medialab-Prado projects because their explorations on complex information are innovative and inventive, therefore I really expect to be able to participate on many of the exiting projects that are going to be shown here.

The event took place in Medialab-Prado Madrid, Spain starting on November 12th 2007