Selected Projects

  1. Walking Art Maps

    Role

    Designer, Developer

    Team of curators, researchers, and designers

    Opportunity

    Porto is a city filled with impressive monuments, statues, and murals. Away from the public eye, a museum's archive held the first sketches, drafts, and ideas behind these artworks. Recognizing the historical value, the museum wanted to showcase the creative process of the artists.

    Solution

    We first created an online tool for the curators to archive information for 100+ artworks that only existed in old written records. We then developed a website that interfaces the digital and physical collections, offering an educational experience to both online and on-site visitors.

  2. School of X

    Role

    Designer, Developer

    Team of tutors and designers

    Opportunity

    The School of X is part of the xCoAx conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X. This was a space where students, researchers, and artists are invited to develop self-directed research. My role was to design and develop the interface for publishing research results.

    Solution

    I streamlined the process for participants to convert research contributions into a markup language without requiring programming skills. Later, I developed a website for conference attendees to read these research insights and for remote users to print them directly from the web interface.

  3. Tactical Watermarks

    Role

    Researcher, Developer

    Team of tutors and community memebers

    Opportunity

    Library Genesis titles are often watermarked. While participating in this library's forum, I discovered a thread titled “How to remove watermarks from PDFs?”. Through interviews with forum members, I identified the need for a tool to anonymize library records. Existing software to remove watermarks was either proprietary and ironically restricted, or ineffective.

    Solution

    Tactical Watermarks is a counter-strategy against closed-access publishing and an alternative form of anonymization. It is a free, open-source online republishing platform that I developed using Flask, hosted on two Raspberry Pis, and accessible through both the clear web and Tor. Tactical Watermarks makes use of digital watermarks to question authorship, protect users’ identities, and subvert surveillance in both physical and digital media.

  4. Birdhouse

    Role

    Designer, Developer

    Team of researchers and designers

    Opportunity

    All Bird Houses are handmade, one-of-a-kind, built to order. They blend the natural beauty of wood, Burel (a traditional Portuguese wool textile), steel, and high-temperature glazed ceramic. Each Bird House is unique. The challenge was to create a website that would not only showcase these exclusive pieces but also facilitate a buying process that reflects the singularity of each piece.

    Solution

    The design web store reflects the handmade, personalised approach to each Bird House. The buying process is non-traditional, requiring customers to place an order and communicate with the designer to ensure their piece meets specific preferences. The website’s design allows the customer to understand and engage with the process, offering a seamless, personal experience from start to finish.

  5. Shadow Libraries

    Role

    Researcher

    Team of researchers and designers

    Opportunity

    Every year, students create study archives, groups, and libraries, but their work is constantly lost. Mainstream digital platforms lack the affordances students need. The opportunity to research a better solution to University of Porto resulted in this 4-year project.

    Solution

    I led comprehensive UX research, conducting semi-structured interviews with 20+ participants, thematic analysis, competitive analysis, and workshops using multiple methodologies such as Crazy 8s, Futures Wheel, SWOT analysis, Dot voting, and guided discussions. The results provided specific guidelines for community members to improve established distribution systems.

Snapshots
  1. UX Designer, Developer

    Birdhouse • 2023

  2. UX Designer, Developer

    More than housing • 2023

  3. Researcher, Designer

    Neural Magazine • 2018

  4. Researcher, Writer

    Collectiveioning • 2020

  5. Speaker

    Thursday Night Live! at Het Nieuwe Instituut • 2018

  6. UX Researcher, Workshop facilitator

    Blurry Boundaries • 2020

Let's talk!

If you would like to know more about the case studies or snapshots contact me.