Where it all started
I have worked with User Experience design since 2013 and I’ve been working with digital marketing since 2004, but I’ve had a fascination for technology for as long as I can remember. Perhaps it was growing up with Spielberg, Lucas, Home computers & the promise of flying Deloreans and robots looming in the early 80’s.
I would try to code my own games in Basic on the Commodore 64 and imitate the early digital designers with KoalaPainter. I have fond memories of the arcades and would later try my hand on various digital media on the Amiga: Pixel art, animation, game design & composing.
At the university
While at the university in the late 90s, I participated in a small community of amateur game designers across the globe. My brother and I had made a number of simple games and we found kindred spirits on the web and dal.net (IRC).
At the university, Don Norman taught me about perceived affordance and I got acquainted with semiotics, ethnographic methods & usability testing. To make a long story short; I realized that to make stuff for people, I had to understand them and their contexts.
Til this day, most work in the industry assumes that tech can solve everything – without asking for whom.
How I work
Most of my work involves understanding and attempting to visualizing how people may think about a certain thing. I capture concepts and help co-creating new ones at whiteboards & in meeting rooms. When the concepts resonate across minds, they sometimes become digital things (apps, sites & digital services)
It sounds very fancy – but it can boil down to: “Do we all agree that it’s this thing, that we’re trying to build” or “could this be a way of doing it?”.
Putting things on a piece of paper or a whiteboard is a powerful tool.
On a good day, there’s time and resources to validate that the thing I’m helping to build is meaningful & works. Either way – the users decide whether it does, in the end – but I prefer to do some validation & testing before hand.
My time off
I enjoy board games, fiction as art form & past time (movies, TV-series & books) and spending time with the family. I’m not big on wars, but I do enjoy tanks & war planes.
I still meddle with amateur game design from time to time and I used to draw a great deal, in the past.