Mauricio Giraldo Arteaga

Master of Human-Computer Interaction
Industrial Designer

I've been working since 1998 on interaction design projects for a wide range of commercial, academic, private and public institutions. I also lectured in the Department of Design of the Universidad de los Andes, a top latin-american university. Founded two interactive and web development agencies where I managed interdisciplinary teams with computer science, marketing, and design backgrounds. I want to find new ways of bringing data and information to people using any available technologies. If you want to know more, please request my resume.

Using computer vision for non-text-based search and exploration of images

Description

Historically, libraries have employed text-based cataloguing to describe their materials. As a result, as more collection materials appear digitally, libraries rely on text-input-based interfaces to facilitate user discovery, usually with an “advanced search” option for more fine-grained text input to individual fields. This approach is useful when patrons are searching for materials based on keywords, but only when those same keywords are present in object descriptions. As such, descriptions can present a barrier to access for use cases that are not accommodated by text-based exploration. I did some experiments with computer-generated metadata to create new pathways for exploration. Informed by user research, I developed two interfaces and a web service. One interface allows for visual exploration of the dataset and creation of custom image groupings; the other interface allows for serendipitous exploration by selecting a random image and displaying it along with other thumbnails that are sorted from most similar to least similar.

Category
Machine learning / Computer vision / User research
Project as part of
DPLA
Date
2018
Technical skills required
Python / JavaScript / CSS
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Digital Public Library of America

Description

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is an institution that aggregates the text metadata from hundreds of libraries across the United States and presents it in a unified search interface. Created in collaboration with design firm Postlight, this ReactJS/NextJS-based application interacts with a headless WordPress backend. I was responsible for completing the work started by the firm, developing new features, and implementing functionality that allowed the codebase to be reused as template for additional websites within DPLA: the DPLA Pro website and the “DPLA Local” initiative, one example of which is Recollection Wisconsin. I also implemented a list-creation feature that takes advantage of browser local storage functionality respecting the user's privacy.

Category
Web development / Responsive design
Date
2018
Technical skills required
ReactJS / NextJS / WordPress API / PHP
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Photographers’ Identities Catalog

Description

Photographers’ Identities Catalog (PIC) is an experimental interface to a collection of biographical data describing photographers, studios, manufacturers, and others involved in the production of photographic images. Consisting of names, nationalities, dates, locations and more, PIC is a vast and growing resource for the historian, student, genealogist, or any lover of photography's history. The information has been culled from trusted biographical dictionaries, catalogs and databases, and from extensive original research by NYPL Photography Collection staff.

Category
Experimental / Data Visualization / Web development
Project as part of
NYPL Labs
Date
2016
Technical skills required
ElasticSearch / TypeScript / CesiumJS / Python / Ruby on rails
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SimplyE

Description

An ebook borrowing and reading app developed by NYPL Labs. This is a revolutionary app in many ways, since it allows public libraries a way to provide a much better ebook-lending experience to their patrons, without depending completely on third party vendors. My involvement was mainly in the user-interface/user-experience design of the app, primarily the iOS version which was then adapted to Android. The mobile app interface aims to get out of the way and let readers easily find, borrow and read the books they want. There is a very nice UI Tour in the Library Simplified website that gives a more detailed overview of the user experience. Being an open source project, this design was also adopted by the Open eBooks initiative.

Category
UI / UX / Mobile
Project as part of
NYPL Labs
Date
2015
Technical skills required
Objective-C / Sketch
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Mansion Maniac

Description

An experimental maze-building game that lets you explore mansion floor plans from early 20th century New York City, sourced from the New York Public Library's Apartment Houses of the Metropolis collection. Speed project made as an example of public domain reuse for the NYPL Public Domain release.

Category
Speed project / Experimental / Game
Project as part of
NYPL Labs
Date
2016
Technical skills required
TypeScript / CreateJS
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MovePix

Description

I have always wanted to reproduce the experience I enjoyed of creating flipbook animations in the edges of textbooks (I did graduate from high school, in case you're wondering). This is a very personal project that I want to improve over time. I also use these applications to learn a new language or a way of doing things. In this case I wanted to learn some Swift and how to integrate the work created in the app in other contexts such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messages.

Category
Mobile development / Animation
Client
Personal project
Date
2015
Technical skills required
Objective-C, Swift
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Building Inspector

Description

Building Inspector is a mobile-first web app for improving information extracted via the Map Vectorizer (see below) from New York City insurance atlases. The output is good, but not perfect, so Building Inspector crowdsources the quality control, inviting users to check the computer's work and identify other valuable information, building by building.

Category
Web development / Crowdsourcing
Project as part of
NYPL Labs
Date
2013
Technical skills required
Ruby on rails, JavaScript, HTML5, PostgreSQL, SCSS
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The Hand of God

Description

This interactive artwork tracks tweets from across the globe using religious keywords in english and spanish (i.e. god, evil, love, hate, hell, good, bad, devil, pray), and allows the player (god) to punish or reward people, send them to heaven or hell, based on the content of those tweets. It is controlled by hand gestures via the beta version of the LEAP sensor. This project is a commentary on religious beliefs aiming to raise questions about divine agency.

This project was done in the context of Art Hack Day (God_Mode) in 319 Scholes Gallery, Brooklyn.

Category
Speed project / Art-hack
Client
Personal project
Date
2013
Technical skills required
Web sockets, Twitter API, HTML, JavaScript
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Loomings

Description

Exploration-meditation on photographs of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

This project was done in collaboration with Ana María Montenegro.

Category
Web app / Art-Game
Client
Personal project
Date
2012—2013
Technical skills required
HTML5, JavaScript
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Stereogranimator

Description

The New York Public Library is home to, among other more prominent collections, the Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views. As can be read in the about page of the site, this project was inspired by a library patron who created animated GIFs out of the images he found in the collection. He did so with extensive knowledge of Adobe Photoshop. The purpose of the Stereogranimator is to allow anyone with a web browser to create not only animated GIF, but also red-blue anaglyph derivatives. The project makes use of the <canvas> tag via EaselJS. A Flash version was created to support older browsers.

Category
Image manipulation / Web development
Project as part of
NYPL Labs
Date
2012
Technical skills required
Ruby on rails, ImageMagick, HTML5, Flash, MySQL
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bitpix

Description

I grew up playing video games and witnessed the rise of the very early consoles up to the current generation. I wanted to create an iOS app that would replicate the low qualitylook of those platforms. I also was interested in doing some research in image manipulation. The design of the app was made in collaboration with El Monocromo.

Category
Image manipulation / Mobile development
Client
Personal project (Ping Pong Estudio) / El Monocromo
Date
2012
Technical skills required
Objective-C, Cocoa Touch, ImageMagick

BodyType

Description

A typeface is an environment for someone’s expression: using typefaces we write documents, create posters and subtitle movies. We follow the type creator’s restrictions and design decisions (kerning, spacing, proportion) when using her fonts. Good typefaces are created by highly-skilled people and can take several years to create. Body Type aims to allow anyone to create a highly expressive and personal typeface using only their body and hand gestures.

Body Type is an excercise on freestyle computing and was built using OpenFrameworks, the Microsoft Kinect sensor, OpenNI, FontForge, Potrace, ImageMagick, PHP, TouchOSC and the Apple iPhone.

The project was presented in Collider 4 and 5 series which examined “the impact, implications and inspiration of the phenomenon generally categorized under the umbrella term New Media within the design practice and fine arts.”

This project was done as part of the requirements to complete the Spring 2011 Interactive Art and Computational Design course with Professor Golan Levin in Carnegie Mellon University.

Category
Kinect-based interaction / Typography
Client
Personal project / Carnegie Mellon University
Date
2011
Technical skills required
OpenFrameworks, OpenNI, C++, ImageMagick, PHP, OSC, Perl
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2D ♥ 3D

Description

2D ♥ 3D is a Kinect-based online multiuser interactive environment. The project is still under development and currently allows multiple web-based users to interact with and augment the physical space of the Kinect participants with virtual objects.

This project was done as part of the requirements to complete the Spring 2011 Interactive Art and Computational Design course with Professor Golan Levin in Carnegie Mellon University.

Category
Kinect-based interaction / Multiuser Experience
Client
Personal project / Carnegie Mellon University
Date
2011
Technical skills required
OpenFrameworks, Flash, XMLSockets
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New Faces

Description

New Faces is a project that began in 2009 after I got fed up with Colombia’s online newspapers’ (one site, another site) high emphasis in sports and celebtrity-related news. I decided to take a screenshot of the offending website and remove this information (along with advertising) in order to see what was left.

Clearly sports, advertising and celebrity news have a relatively high importance for this colombian newspaper (at least in its online incarnation). This led me to wonder if this was the same across different countries. I decided to create a Python script that makes use of webkit2png-0.5 to take a screenshot of eleven news websites every night at 8pm. This script has been ran almost every night since November 8, 2009.

After seeing Rutherford Chang’s work with the New York Times where he blacks-out every element in the page except faces (no link available, sorry) I thought it would be an interesting idea to execute this same process in my dataset of more than 3,000 files and 10 GB.

This project was done as part of the requirements to complete the Spring 2011 Interactive Art and Computational Design course with Professor Golan Levin in Carnegie Mellon University.

Category
Data visualization
Client
Personal project / Carnegie Mellon University
Date
2011
Technical skills required
Processing, Python, OpenCV, Flash, ActionScript
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socially nervous

Description

Social network services[1] enable people to communicate with each other in ways that would be considered science fiction only a few years ago. This enablement has been welcome by people at large, with some criticisms concerning personal privacy and how well (or not) the networks they model reflect real life (offline) relationships. socially nervous is a commentary on how these services have affected our way we perceive these relationships.

The object
An electronic “pet” with movement and audiovisual actuation capabilities. The pet will communicate wirelessly with a host computer which in turn will receive information from the owner’s personal “identities” in two social network services: Facebook and Twitter. Only incoming information to these profiles will be taken into account (information generated by the user’s “friends”).

This information will be manifested physically by the pet’s behavior (movement, sound, light). As information is accumulated by the pet, manifestations become more intense and erratic. As soon as someone touches the pet, it “forgets” any information stored and “sleeps”. The process begins again as soon as physical contact is lost.

Awkwardness
The pet's shape is informed by the awkwardness inherent in the process of virtual socialization. The object could easily be a teddy bear or some other more familiar shape which would make the observer want to interact with it. Instead, I decided to create a non-familiar, even agressive, shape with sharp edges and non-symmetrical shape. An observer would notice an erratically-behaving object wandering about in response to virtual interactions. By touching it, the user "calms" the pet; physical interaction "defeats" virtual interaction.

Behavior states
Any information received by the pet will provoke behaviors in any of these types: physical, visual, auditive. The stimulus is always represented in the 5×7 matrix as an icon followed by the username/alias of the person who provoked it.

A video of the behaviors working (indirect stimulus received via Bluetooth from a computer not in video). Initial/passive message was later changed to “please hug me”:

Part list

I used 3mm laser-cut acrylic for the box (Sketchup 3D file).

A Processing-based visual interface will be developed to manage Facebook and Twitter profile settings.

This project was done as part of the requirements to complete the Fall 2010 Making Things Interact course with Professor Mark Gross in Carnegie Mellon University.

Category
Tangible computing
Client
Personal project / Carnegie Mellon University
Date
2010
Technical skills required
Wiring, Processing, Twitter API, Facebook API
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Pagans

Description

iOS (iPhone/iPod Touch) card-based game created as part of personal research interest in mobile platforms. Conceived and built from scratch in Objective-C.

Category
Game design / Mobile development
Client
Personal project (Ping Pong Estudio)
Date
Technical skills required
2010—2011
More information
Objective-C, Cocoa Touch

The videogame history timeline

Description

For a long time I wanted to do a videogame history timeline. It would combine several of my interests: information visualization, history, time and, of course, videogames. I developed this timeline as a reference tool for a lecture I taught in the Design Department at the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). The information is stored in Drupal CMS and accessed by the interface via AMFPHP.

Made with the valuable support from Powerflasher GmbH, makers of FDT.

Category
Data visualization
Client
Personal project
Date
2010
Technical skills required
Drupal CMS, PHP, Flash, ActionScript
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