ME, MYSELF AND I
I'm moved mostly by learning new things, finding connections between different fields and disciplines. I experiment with different techniques and mediums and do these deep dives where I learn the history of a craft and how it evolved. If I see something I want to try I just do it — I buy the materials, I download the software, I watch youtube videos, I read about it and then I try things out. I make mistakes, I experiment ideas, I have my notes app full of pages called idea which is sometimes something simple, sometimes something crazy that I want to explore. This allows me to have a wide range of knowledge across technology, design and manual craft that I draw inspiration from for everything I do.
I would go to a new city and look at all the signs, all the typographies, how the doors look, the handles and I would be like, where is this coming from? This happened to me in Prague recently which made me read about the early 1900s Art Nouveau movement there and how the Austro-Hungarian empire was still around, how the Vienna Secession movement was so predominant. This led me to check the local museum websites which have a ton of free resources and access to their collections. I also wanted to understand how was life at the time so I found this author Stefan Zweig who wrote The World of Yesterday and I wanted to read to learn more about this era.
I write about these rabbit holes in El Reblujo ↗
I'm always working at the intersection or the extremes of the analogue and the digital. On one side I make clothes through sewing, knitting, crochet — but I've also worked with 3D clothes, using software for 3D modeling of sewing patterns and simulation for animation. Or learning screen printing and then understanding how shadow and light is represented through dots and how this translates to risograph techniques and then how this translates to a digital medium, learning how you transform color pixels to greyscale.
I studied product design engineering and I've worked designing and 3D modeling patient specific implants for 3D printing, working with patients' CT scans, doctors and the constraints of the human body. I've worked prototyping and actually building cow feeders. I also founded with a friend a 3D design studio where I worked for 3 years as a creative director and 3D generalist bringing clients' projects to life from idea to execution in fashion, product and events.
While working on the studio I started working for a computer vision company in the UK as a 3D technical artist, mainly building procedural and automated pipelines in Houdini to generate synthetic data for training machine learning models. I then transitioned to the first and only product designer where I drove the redesign of the product to be more user centric, pushed for a change in everything we did — questioning who we were serving, who was the user and what were their needs. I designed a mobile app from 0 to 1 and maintained its design to fit our product needs over time. I'm involved in all parts of the process from initial problem statement, talking to users, ideation, brainstorming, talking to the engineers about constraints, creating prototypes and sometimes even implementing features in the actual product, to even QA.
I don't see my role as a product designer or user researcher or front end developer but as a builder that wants to deliver something and looks for the tools to make it happen. I bring this energy to everything I do — I don't see limitations in what I know or don't know but opportunities in experimenting, learning and growing. I'm not afraid to get my assumptions challenged, to change my ways of working and to learn new tools.
In six years I've gone from designing prosthetics in Brazil to prototyping cattle equipment in Colombia to running a 3D animation studio to building procedural ML pipelines to leading product design at a computer vision startup in London — and I've never stopped making things on the side.