Hi, I'm Aitor.

And you are probably someone reviewing applications for CIID Summer School 2012... what a beautiful coincidence! Nice to meet you.

Can we talk for a minute?

Why CIID?

That murmur.

Can you hear it? In the beginning it was an inaudible utterance, like a group of people speaking at a distance. But has been growing for years, louder and louder all the time. Now, sometimes it’s so loud I can barely think… I can’t focus, I can’t rest.

Sometimes it’s like a electric buzz… the rumor of servos and engines revolving at incredible speeds. Swarms of über-cheaps drones flying together in complex formations while the software installed in a remote computer controls their movements. I can imagine the lines of code running on their tiny brains, dutifully adjusting their destination to 64.150596,-21.956474. I can almost understand what they trying to tell me.

But the murmur becomes unintelligible again. It grows into a deafening humming of new, strange interactions: a mess of machines printing another machines, of software embodied in things that are not computers, of public spaces that are not passive containers anymore, of digital ghosts leaking into reality… Oh God, if only the noise wasn’t so loud.

But more than anything else, that noise is the sound of a wall collapsing in front of us. It’s the tremor of the digital and physical tectonic plates shifting, creating new mountains and valleys packed with the children of a new aesthetic that we are still creating. How can we interact with them? How can we talk with them? Do they even need us?

For a long time it was pretty clear that the software we were creating was made by lines of code, that the context for using it was that screen in front of us -the PC- and that the users of our work were very much other human beings.

Now I look around me and I have no idea what anything is or does anymore. Software is the mythological hydra turned digital, turned invisible, turned ubiquitous, turned anything and everything, anywhere and everywhere. The way software is constantly permeating through our society, our culture, our civilization is much deeper than what we used to think. The murmur will not stop.

I would like to attend CIID Summer School to understand that murmur.

Why me?

Learning by doing.

The CIID Summer School 2012 mini-site says that the Institute follows this philosophy. Me too.

I’ve been writing code for a living for more than 14 years and one of the things I’ve learnt in this time, is that no matter how beautiful, ugly, complex or simple the inner workings of a technology are, what defines our behavior is the interactions we shape on it.

I want to learn to create better interactions, better experiences, different experiences and I’m prepared to apply that new knowledge to my work. In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that I will not be able to create great products or services in the next years without having a better knowledge of how great interactions are created.

I think that my previous experience in some areas like development, marketing or management can be useful to create a balanced group in the Summer School and I’ll be happy to share what I know at the same time I learn in new areas.

Five years ago I cofounded Linking Paths, a web company obsessed with creating simple and useful web applications. I’ve learnt a lot of things in this time, but I refuse to be only one thing. I’m not happy being “a developer” anymore; the tag has become constraining, dehumanizing. I refuse to accept a monochrome version of myself that spans my interests or capabilities only to a few areas.

Specialization is for insects, and I want to be a human.

Absurdly in love with high quality, long lasting products, I cofounded Jositajosi with my wife in 2009, a small company that makes awesome sleeves for that shiny gadgets you carry with you everywhere.

Our society is becoming software-based and, as consequence, a few years ago I founded Pro Bono Publico, the main advocate of Open Data in Spain and organizer of AbreDatos, a 48h hackaton to develop open source public services.

Born in that small, beautiful corner of the world called Basque Country, I’m currently living in Reykjavík, Iceland, where I keep marvelling at how awesome my wife is, how short is our life and how full of challenges the World is these days.

Portfolio

Although my career has been traditionally related to programming, in recent years, my role in most of the projects has been a hybrid between development and web design. What follows is a short list of some of the projects in which I've participated recently:

ABCKit

ABCKit is an educational app for iPhone and iPad, based on the Montessori Methodology to teach kids between 2 and 5 years the letters in multiple languages.

I developed the app from start to finish. Based on the wireframes provided by Arquinauta I wrote all the drawing interactions, the code for including new languages in a flexible way and the final packaging and distribution to the App Store.

Checkout ABCKit

Verkami

Verkami is the leading crowdfunding platform in Spain, focused on helping creative projects become reality, with nearly 300 projects funded in his first year.

In a relationship that continues today, I created all the backend and frontend code of verkami.com. This include payment gateway integrations, multilanguage support, a highly scalable platform, CDN support, etc.

With an original design created by Vostok, these days I’m the main designer for the new features in the platform.

Go to verkami.com

Pro Bono Publico

Our society is becoming software based and, as consequence, I founded Pro Bono Publico, the main advocate of Open Data in Spain and organizer of AbreDatos, a 48h hackaton to develop open source public services.

During the last years I’ve created and participated in multiple projects, scrapers and open source libraries to promote Open Data in Spain:

Go to probp.org

The Age Of Fiction

Using the Internet Movie Database as datasource, Age of Fiction generates a new chronology based on the fictional time elapsed since we started creating movies.

I wrote a software called Bergman that periodically downloads, cleans and parses the data, computes the total length of all films ever made and calculates the current fictional “speed of time”.

With this information Bergman transfer the current “Age of Fiction” to an Arduino device that displays the date in an accessible dd/mm/yyyy format.

See dossier

Jositajosi

Absurdly in love with high quality, long lasting products, I cofounded Jositajosi in 2009, a small company that makes awesome sleeves for that shiny gadgets you carry with you everywhere.

Building on top of a original logo made for us by La Personnalité I’ve been in charge for design and copywriting of all kind of marketing and graphic material:

  • Personal mailing for customers
  • Letterpressed Xmas
  • Banners for workshops,
  • Promotional videos

Go to jositajosi.com

Open Source

Throughout my career, I’ve been an active member of the Open Source community. Here are some of the open source projects I’ve created:

  • acts_as_scribe A rails plugin that allows to keep track of the users activity.
  • alea A ruby gem that aim to bring some aleatory behavior to ruby Kernel.
  • meta_tags A rails plugin that gives you control over the xhtml meta tags.

Go to github.com

Final remarks

  • Many of the projects I have been involved are commercial projects and therefore I can’t disclose the code or any internals by default. I can, however, ask for permission to send you private details on any of the projects if it’s needed.
  • Thank you very much for taking the time to read my application. I love you.