Freie Freude

Just a quick (and slightly delayed) note to let you all know that after seven years I have left Igalia. It has really been an amazing, rocking place to be, and I have the best wishes for the company and its people.

Malmö seaside view, with the bridge to Denmark in the background.

Currently, I am living in Malmö (Sweden), where I am taking part in the Master in Interaction Design. This will be my second Master’s degree, after the one on HCI that I studied at the University of York in 2009. But whereas that was more focused on theory and academical research, this one is eminently practical: the course is structured around projects that try to go beyond the boundaries of mainstream everyday design, using many different techniques and tools to gather insights and quickly build working prototypes.

I don’t know yet what the future holds, but that is a question for the new year.

This blog will be frozen after this post; if you want to keep in touch, I’m  @felipeerias on Twitter.

Just a quick note to let the world know that today I am officially becoming a teleworker and moving to Barcelona. I am really thankful to Igalia for giving me this flexibility; it is amazing to be able to make your job and your personal life work together instead of having one determine the other.

Finally! I have returned to this blog after a year and a half of absence. My last entry was written in the Canary islands during the GCDS and lots of things have happened in the meantime.

On October 2009 I took a year off from work to take part in the MSc. in Human-Centred Interactive Technologies at the University of York. This is a full-time MSc. that focuses on providing a theoretical basis and research methodology for the design and evaluation of interactive systems. The experience was great, I learnt a lot, met many good people and even got a distinction out of it. The whole thing began as a crazy idea but now I am very happy that I was able to do it.

I returned to Igalia a couple of months ago and am back at working on free technologies. Now that I have some formation on interaction design and usability, I plan to gradually orient my work more and more towards these topics. I really hope to be able to write here more often.

Christmas is here once again, and as always it is a good time to look back. A year ago I was living in Germany, where I was doing an internship at IBM. This Christmas, I’m in Coruña again, working for Igalia in projects of such amazing coolness as Modest and Vagalume. The road has been hard sometimes, but also fun and interesting, and I can only hope that it keeps that way so I can write a similar post next year.
My only advice for the incoming year is to follow the lesson behind Vagalume’s incoming “Recommend to…” button: look for beauty, share it with your friends and have fun. And do a little dancing, too.

This is the first post in my blog. From now on, I intend to use this blog to talk about a wide range of stuff, most of it somehow related to the Free SW world and my work at Igalia.