When I joined my master program I found out they had an Internship program with them so I just went to seed them, it didn’t took long for them to call me and quickly we arranged everything for me to be working with them.

Two years and some months after dnx has partnered with a scandinavian Design consultancy, moved offices and on my side, I have started my T-shape path as I’ve worked in many research projects, lead multiple platform projects, from websites to tv interfaces, iPad apps, mobile apps, with big corporates and startups. I even ended up co-teaching a couple of courses at the h2i Institute, started Service Design Drinks Madrid with colleagues from work. Many many exciting things.

It was really nice to remember that I’ve meet Liz about 8 years ago at one of the conferences organized by my Uni.

This time instead of a conference it was an actual workshop where we learned how to prepare a co-creation session and actually experienced in its full, both as researchers and as participants. I must point out that the level of discussion was really high as there where designers, h2i students and professional researchers who attended and enriched the content with their experience.

One big takeaway of mine, besides the co-creation technique by itself is to be able to ask someone with so many years of experience in the Design Research field What is the role of the designer within the research? to what Liz responded “As a participant”. I felt such a relief to hear that coming from Liz, we had such discussions all the time at Designit Madrid, being a place with a very strong research background.

Useful Links:

http://www.maketools.com/

http://thinkaboutit.designit.com/issue/co-creation-welcome-contribution-economy-0

One of the reasons I was interested on going to this course was my curiosity to learn further about blueprinting, which is the tool that always attracted me as an Information and Interaction Designer, but also I was curious to learn how other professionals in the field prepared a course we had the chance to teach in one single week last November (Charlotte and I) at the h2i institute innovation programe. It all looked very exciting as it will be.

1st week

We had our presentations, it was great to get to know everyone, people from different ages, countries and professional backgrounds, most of the nationals where older, about one third of the class just graduated from their BA’s, and there where many europeans but also from other parts of the world such as Brazil or Singapore.

After our presentations, you can find mine here, we where given our respective projects, which where randomly assigned, if we wanted a different one we had the chance to swap with a team member of the one we wanted to work on. I was really lucky that my team got along since the first moment, there is no doubt that this was greatly due to Matthew Paynne who has great team facilitation skills.

The second day Bruno introduced us to Service Design methodologies which was one of the exercises I enjoyed the most, as we learn to see how every consultancy has arranged their own methodology to portray their design process as well as the kind of projects they dedicate to. It was great to sort out our own methodology to develop our own projects as some people would like to emphasize the iteration process others would like to emphasize parallel users research, etc.

We had a talks which included Ella Britton from Think Public, Jaimes Neil from Engine and Jonas Piet from live|work talked to us about Co-design, Research Myths and Methods and strategies to keep projects going after the agency is gone, that was one of my favorite parts of the course.

Something really interesting is that by the end of the week and after one week of research all the teams reformulated the briefs in order to be more assertive to our client needs.

2nd week

Today Central Saint Martins is in a new location that I asume is more accessible, last year we where on the old building which was not in a very good condition so we moved to the Farringdon building in order to be in a better place, I like that area as we where near to the Leather Lane Market, one of my very best friends lives just right there.

Anyhow, the second week was really intense because we had to prototype out service proposal, so our team decided to go for a video, we had the super talented Edward who was really talented with post it’s and markers so we just took over the legos and started prototyping just right there, well not before working out our ideas, the prototype was really useful to see what worked and what didn’t in a very cheap way, we only needed one or two iterations to get it straight but still we had a lot of fun, here is a sample of it.

I will certainly recommend to graduates and curious professionals to give a look in to this course if you have a bit of Service Design bug.

It reflects about service design valuable tools, highlights it’s value, and looks at the success of service-based economies.

Please find the article in this link:

http://designit.com/news/inside-service-design-an-in-depth-study

Robert Bringhurst

I was not surprise but however I was admired that he did knew spanish, sadly due to his age and the topic matter he give the talk in English, it made me wonder about the compromises we make with language, and the pity that must be when you can’t actually recall something you knew once. Well long story short, Mr. Bringhurst deserve all my admiration, a full humanist passionate about history and art, with great amount of attention to detail, completely capture me with such an amazing presentation, narrating the Palatino history with every single detail from the roman origins to the relationship he developed with Hermann Zapf after going through all the Linotype files, he also made his opinion clear about digital typography and Microsoft behavior regarding this matter, which I certainly find interesting, mainly after watching Simon Daniels at the FontShop webfonts week in Mexico City, you make up your own conclussions of this guy’s principles.

There is no doubt I am going to be impatiently waiting for the promised book by this Bringhurst regarding Palatino, mainly after watching all those super cared and well crafted slides that helped him narrate it’s fantastic story.

Please hurry Mr. Bringhurst.