The Cosmonaut

Me comenta Kepa Landa que la Universidad Europea de Madrid ofrecerá para este próximo curso un grado en Diseño, oficial, aprobado por el ministerio y pionero en España.

Parece que aún hay poca información sobre el profesorado, pues sólo veo 12 nombres (y muchas más asignaturas). El plan de estudios tiene buen aspecto, bastante completo, aunque con poquita carga de diseño de interacción dado que las especializaciones son Diseño Gráfico, de Interiores, de Producto y de Moda, un poco en la linea del IED.

Creo que hubiera sido bueno apostar más por el nuevo diseño de producto, con más énfasis en lo tecnológico y en la interacción persona-ordenador. Aún así hay que reconocer el mérito de sacar una titulación así adelante. Les deseo suerte!

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:

• Jesús Carreras gave us a workshop on Card Sorting.
• Ale Muñoz talked about data visualization.
• María Martínez did a pre-release private demo of iwannagothere.net and explained some of the design decisions behind it.
• Clarisa Doval talked about user dynamics in websites for dating.
• Nauzet Santana gave us an introduction to Robotics and Lego Mindstorms.

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!

Some are extracted from the talks I attended while some others come from my personal-internal reboot:

1. There is a world out there, go reach it.
2. Your shit is someone else’s food (metaphorically speaking, ok?).
3. Own no more than 5 things you use, or else things will use you instead.
4. Leave your shit behind, it will serve others and make you more free.
5. If you reinterpret space and use it in non-conventional ways you are on advantage.
6. Courage is one of the most important things in life.
7. You can design your own life.
8. Do-ers are better than thinkers (in case you had to chose).
9. Conferences on a far away city are great for putting thoughts in order.
10. Web2.love is still the only strategic approach that makes sense when creating things.

I would love to see some more of these shared by other atendees. Please, let me know if you happen to post yours.