Design Journey
Revealing my narrative is challenging without discussing my origin and what elements molded me.
Through Lines (or Intertwingled)
Our existences are interlinked in numerous areas, on various dimensions. Nothing is isolated without influencing something else. The lines with the points denote some of these links in my life.
Design roots
Setting roots
Formation
The Shiny Stuff
Sharing
In the 1960s, Mexico City was transformed by the Olympic games, world cup, and human rights activism. This fueled a design boom for many great architects and artists, including my parents.
This mixture of social, functional and aesthetic design created the foundation of my design journey. Growing up I poured over works from Luis Barragan, Ricardo Legorreta, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueros.
This provided my family rich soil grow our design roots. My father contributed significant architectural and social landmarks.
This lead to many lectures from him on the importance of the flow of people through space and the creation of social spaces.
After the design boom in Mexico City, my parents found opportunities in Palm Springs, California. This playground to Hollywood stars was its own design oasis known for mid-century modernism and the Studebaker Avanti.
My work had paid off and I was accepted into Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. I focused on screen based products. The curriculum did not yet have a formal UX program, but I forged ahead and paved my own path. The foundations I gained through this formal training guides my design principles.
I found a greater appetite for innovation in the digital side of product design. The internet was still in it’s infancy and society was just getting acquainted with the medium. My transition into the digital space consisted mainly of learning the terminology as the design process is mostly the same.
I moved to the beach cities to pursue an opportunity at iRise, an enterprise application for building software prototypes. I had the opportunity to study how design teams at Wells Fargo, Target, UPS and other large organizations worked. My experience with this team created my first design pillar, Prototype Everything.
My work with Disney, Nordstrom, and Amazon gave me an opportunity to work on large projects within massive organizations. I was able to mature my design thinking and learn how to turn it inward to improve a company.
In tandem, I had started exploring micro-controllers, sensors and automation. This reconnected me with physical to digital experiences, where I had started my career path.
With Spectrum, I was able to combine my interesting in sensors and data visualization. Their Smart City initiatives have functional, social and aesthetic design challenges are resonate back to the start of my design journey,
While I continue to learn and evolve with the industry, I have started to take time to share my learning with others. I have started mentoring through ADPList and plan to progress towards teaching UX in a manner that is accessible to a wider set of the population.
3000+ minutes of mentorship
as of Feb 2024
Top 1% of Mentors for December 2023 and January 2024
The desert provided ideal weather for year round outdoor activities for me such as soccer, running, and hiking. In high school, I had the pleasure of being coached John Carlos, the US Olympic sprinter who stood up for human rights at the Mexico City Olympics.
By high school, I had fixed my sights on a career in design. I poured over design books and dissected products to understand how they worked. The first iteration of my portfolio started in 1992 for my college application.
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‘24
After graduation, I started my professional journey working on physical interfaces, remote controls. This quickly showed me the realities of limited project scope.
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