Might be related to the fact that I’ve finally watched ‘The Watchment‘ movie yesterday, maybe the geek side in me, but I just came across this nice photo gallery by Steve Schofield, portraying a bunch of real life people dressed up as their favorite sci-fi characters.
Posted: October 29th, 2009 | Author: pecusWOW!!! What an year!!
The year started on a Segway, two interviews: one for Público a national newspaper and a second one for the national tv channel news, both about my daily ramblings on segway on my way to work.
I guess it’s normal that I feel a bit exhausted by this year end, never in my life traveled so much: Milan, Geneva (2x), London, Funchal, Amsterdam, Dusseldorf, not considering the inside Portugal traveling and the car trip to Spain during the summer vacations.
Looking back at 2008, it’s probably also the year that I’ve worked harder and accomplished more, I started the year by changing roles inside SAPO, headed the quality and usability project for the entire project, which was something that I LOVED doing, the results are good I guess, but I’ve come to realize that neither me, nor the project could cope with such pace, so a change was needed. I delivered a bunch of public presentations: Usability & Quality, (Almost) Free Usability Testing, Playful Interfaces, Mind the Gap, Forms 101.
Celebrated my 6th year (happily) married! :O
With summer came the Spanish journey and with it the discovery of a big part of our own and ancient history as a nation, we took (almost) two weeks discovering and visiting a big part of the Castile & Leon region in Spain by car, visited a lot of unique places, fall in love with Burgos & Salamanca and camped by Picos de Europa. Even managed to be filmed for a promotional video for the spanish turism hehehe
I became 32! As a present, my doctors assured me that the health issue (crises) that started in 2007 had passed by! Best gift possible! Plus earned an Ice Cream maker, which was the second best gift, considering how addicted I am for ice creams.
Started going to the gym on a regular basis (+3 times per week).
A lot of this year’s spare time was spent planning and delivering SHiFT 2008, which an amazing set of people that joined the project this year. By the end of it and apart from the typical problems we had something in mind already: 2009, so I’m hopeful for the future regarding SHiFT as well.
With November we all realized that Yes We Can!
Even the birth of M., daughter of A. & J. showed me that anything is possible if there is enough energy and love! She was born under extreme conditions (520g) and against all odds she’s still fighting as we speak and showing us what life is all about while still warming up our hearts to see her grow by the day.
Celebrated a true Christmas Eve at our place surrounded by a big part of the family, apart from the planning and cooking for 12, it was probably the best Christmas Eve in years!
My movie(s) of the year: Into the Wild
My music of the year: School Of Kraut – Peter Bjorn and John
My book of the year: Ten Faces of Innovation
Don’t know what 2009 has in store for all of us…
but I’ve witness incredible progresses in the past eyers and I honestly believe that we are on the verge of something incredible important, wether by the advances in biotech, robotics, artificial intelligence and neurosciences or simply by the world climate changes, one thing is certain, all combined will inevitably pressure us to change, let’s just hope that in time!
Wishing all os you and me an extreme and filled 2009.
See you all next year!
Validation 
I’ll in Copenhagen for Reboot 10, from tomorrow to Saturday, seems I just can’t get enough from this city, so there’s no lame excuse to be there!
Reboot is a unique happening, it has been a personal reboot for the past 4 years, a time off I take to brainwash myself with new and amazing ideas, but also, an opportunity to check back on friends I don’t get to see every as often as I’d like.
Tomorrow afternoon (25th) and just before Pre-Reboot Get Together, Henriette managed to persuade me to join her on workshop entitled “Community Building – Next Level“, so if you’re in Copenhagen and you’re as passionate as us about Social Web and Online Communities, join us there!
This year a bit like Peter Rukavina suggested I’ve “organically” taken a step further and I submited two proposals for presentations at Reboot. I’ll be presenting some low cost, agile techniques and solutions to the problem of ’sky rocketing costs’ of traditional usability testing. If you’re interested join me for “(Almost) Free Usability Testing”
Just arrived @LIFT for its second day, as expected its first day was an intense experience, coming to LIFT always has the effect of recharding another… could be for the frenetic sharing of ideas, the conversations, I honestly don’t know! But I know others that probably agree with me.
LIFT as evolved, Laurent’s team introduced a lot of changes and managed to somehow take LIFT to the next level, I’ll be posting my notes from the different talks I’ve attended on the next coming days, but I would like to highlight some of the things that really got my attention on the first day:
Genevieve Bell
GBell is an internationally recognized ethnographer, and she actually gave one of the best presentation of day, or could just be me, who am a bit biased towards her presentation subject: Secrets, lies & digital deceptions. As a society we all basically lie and we’ve managed to introduce this behavior into our online life’s.
During my workshop here at LIFT I’ve talked a lot about the role of personalization inside online communities, the importance of identity, the need we as humans have to make some sort of ‘impressions’ management and the image we try to project trough our online avatars. I’ve talked a bit how the creation of this personas empower’s us as users to adapt to specific contexts. It has all to do with Integration.
So to some extent it was nice to hear someone like Genevieve stating precisely that, how people lie to adapt, as a self-defense mechanism that helps protect our identity. At the same time, sharing secrets seems to be the base of trust, as in real life, the sharing is what brings us together, so does the same somehow happens online, the more information you share about yourself the more people somehow trust you and your avatar.
Her passionate presentation is already available on video, so take sometime, I really think it’s worth it.
Jonathan Cabiria
Still on the same line of though, Jonathan also gave an great presentation on Permeability. Permeability in the sense of what comes out of our online lives and somehow crosses to our real life and vice-versa. According to Jonathan by being in virtual worlds, people are many times confronted with hidden parts (facets) of themselves, they get the ability of trying out things they might not feel comfortable to do in real life for oh so many reasons. Jonathan also presented a study that showed how this good feelings managed to transpose themselves to the real world and have helped people suffering from depressions to recover from it by rising their feelings of integration, loneliness, isolation, pessimism and/or low self-esteem.
What I took from Jonathan’s message is that the online and real worlds are merging, we’re seeing people moving a big part of their ’social’ lives online. One interesting thought he mentioned was how many times, developers like myself don’t really grasp the entire implications of a social platform that we’ve built. The social applications of a social platform is many times bigger than expected and reaches people and highs that could have never been predicted.
Second day is just starting so for now I just leave this two very short comments on yesterday’s presentations but I promise to write a bit more as soon as I managed to digest all the input I got from yesterday.
One final note for the amazing work that Cristiana and her team from Bread and Butter produced for this year, there are a total of 10 different art projects!
Posted: February 8th, 2008 | Author: pecusYesterday, just as I finished the workshop on Online Communities), Hamish Campbell caught me and managed to record a short interview where I’ve answered some of his pretty hard questions about the role of online communities as tools for social change…
Posted: February 7th, 2008 | Author: pecusLIFT08 is happening this coming week in Geneva, it’s concept is very similar to the one we tried to accomplish in SHiFT (which we hope to deliver yet again this year – three full days of workshops, talks, social activities and discussions to get a look at the most important technological trends and meet the people behind them.
After almost didn’t make it this year (time constraints and in the end Patrícia not being able to come along), in the end I’ll be in Geneva to take part of this amazing event and I’ve even proposed an an experimental workshop on Online Community Design Patterns.
This workshop is the evolution from my “Conversational Design presentation“, that I presented last november at the Web2Expo in Berlin . Back in November I tried to squeeze a lot of information in a 50 minute presentation and although the feedback was more than positive, the fact was that I had to leave quite a lot out. The initial presentation aimed to be more practical than theoretical, so in a sense the move to a workshop makes more sense, workshops enable participation and sharing, so in the end we’ll manage to hear, learn and test a lot more than my ideas on this subject.
I'm Pedro Custódio. I'm a Webdeveloper and UserExperience Advocate, I'm organizer of SHiFT and I'm currently working for the Vodafone 360 project.