I lived my childhood across the 80’s: Knight Rider, cassette tapes, Spectrum ZX, Game&Watch (and no, Game Boy wasn’t around yet), He-man, Walkman…With all this wonderful stuff stimulating my imagination, creativity was floating in the air. It’s funny how many of these things mentioned above have come back quite strongly. Right?
It happened one afternoon, playing under the living room table with some of my favorite toys and some modeling clay that I kept in a shoebox. I divided the shoebox into several parts and started to build the control panel first, then the chair and finally I built the whole room from which E.T. would pilot his ship. It was then that I saw with absolute clarity that it was about that, to adapt the world’s surroundings to our needs. The fact is that the “Extraterrestrial Centered Design” made me discover by analogy the “Human Centered Design”; it was 1983. My modeling clay creations began to become popular. On my report card, Miss Angela wrote “he is a modeling artist”. I went from modeling clay to doodling with no other purpose than having fun. I remember that I won a painting prize and they gave me various ‘El Quixote’ books with real photos and drawn characters. I memorized every page by reading them multiple times. One day they disappeared, but recently I found a similar edition at a book fair. I spent a whopping two euros to retrieve that treasure.
Skateboarding was next big thing. The incredible designs of those boards awoke my interest in graphic design. However, after many bumps and falls I decided it was important to keep my bones safe.Soon music became an essential part of my life. I persuaded both my grandmother and my mother to buy me an electric guitar. My doubt was whether to buy a left-handed guitar or to adapt and prevent complications, I chose the latter. I am a “refurbished” lefty.
As my interested in music grew, I began studying Graphic Design. That’s when I had my next and perhaps most important revelation: “In digital world there’s room for almost anything I like”. Of course, my degree final project merged music and interface design into an application focused in the guitar world. Since then, I’ve been digitally adapting the world to our needs.
Music has always fed my passion for the English language. Many of my favourite science fiction films were shot in the UK. Liverpool was the chosen city to live, learn and work for a while. I loved the challenge, although I went through some moments of despair over the scouse dialect. I overcame the challenge with effort, tenacity and spending many, many pounds on private lessons. I brought back friendships that will endure time and distance.Finally, I’d like you to ponder the following. Shouldn’t our cars in the year 2020 be flying by now? And shouldn’t we be tying our shoes without the need of a piece of string? And, when will we have to stop inventing and memorizing absurd alphanumeric password combinations just to read our email or buy something?
I will continue in my efforts to adapt the world’s surroundings to our needs. Let’s improve today’s interfaces and this will lead us to the future we imagine.