Ana Amorim graduated in Communication Design from the School of Fine Arts, Lisbon in 2002. This part of her education gave strong emphasis to abstract and conceptual thinking, aesthetics, cultural theory and sociology. Projects developed during this period focused on the relationship between public and private space, memory and proxemics. In parallel to her studies she worked as junior creative to BBDO where I was responsible for the creation of advertisement campaigns for the web.
After her 5-year degree, she worked as portal and campaign designer for Oniway, a telecom operator that was preparing the launch of 3G phones in the portuguese market. During a year she designed, managed and supported the mobile online portal's content development, directly reporting to the content managers of the portal.
From this experience she became slowly aware of the importance of usability and user-centered design in the development of interactive products and decided to go back to school to study Ergonomics in Information Systems Design. This education programme was focused on user-centered design methodologies and the human variability that impacts the design of human-technology interactions - cognitive psychology, information architecture, accessibility guidelines and usability evaluation were some of the taught subjects.
Ana's final project for this one-year post-graduate specialization was an comparative usability study of the three concurrent online portals operating in the portuguese market. She submitted the proposal to one of the biggest telecom operator in Portugal that agreed to sponsor the project even though it was a novelty at the time. The final report was very well received and it was object of internal discussion about the relevance of this type of work in the industry.
Immediately after this, Ana was accepted in the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy to develop a two-year MA in Interaction Design. This course radically expanded her understanding of design beyond aesthetics and function to include meaning, emotion and playfulness. She was introduced to systemic thinking and the design of complex ecologies of touchpoints, diverse stakeholders and interactions overtime. Subjects covered during the first year included graphical user interface, tangible user interfaces, service design, design of play, user research, physical computing and experience prototyping.
In June 2005, she joined the User Experience Unit of Nokia in Helsinki as summer intern. During two months, Ana developed research and first concepts on social conventions getting established around the mobile call handling practice and how infrastructure is currently constraining social behavior. This was the first time she was being asked to focus on the human side of an interaction and identify opportunities for a more 'polite' enabled technology. In the end of this internship, she had the opportunity to share her work with Jan Chipchase (principal researcher at Nokia) that agreed to become external advisor on her thesis at IDII.
Ana's topic of research was on people's management of personal time and space when their availability is expected 24/7. She approached this problem both from a macro/ systemic level - what if the user, rather than the mobile operator, has ownership over his ID - and a micro/tangible one - what are the opportunities to develop a 'body language' for technology mediated communication? The outcome of this project was a service model and a new desktop metaphor.
Still on the development phase of her thesis work, IDEO came to Milan to recruit and Ana was selected to join the Chicago office. IDEO provided her the opportunity to work across a variety of industries, client types and phases of development of a project, working in multi-disciplinary teams together with anthropologists, architects, fashion designers, business specialists, etc.
Projects at IDEO include a shared communication device for the home, online banking solutions for young adults, an online music-delivery service/interface design and an online mapping tool developed both on strategic and implementation levels.
After two years in IDEO, Ana developed the ability to combine the innovative, perceptive and holistic insights of a designer with the pragmatic and systematic skills of a planner to guide strategic direction in context of brand intent, design quality and customer values.
Her next professional step should follow this same direction. As an inquisitive mind, Ana likes to be exposed to a variety of challenges, industries and user types as it allows her to gradually build an understanding of global patterns, trends and business implications that she believes are an essential aspect of the design practice.
