IDF | Learn UX with Me

My Unconventional way

of saying: Hire Me!

A job application to The Interaction Design Foundation by Martino Liu

Product Designer, Scrum Master, and Mentor at iTexico

This is my wife Betty, my sons Kaiyan and Kaishei, and me during our last family trip to Oaxaca, Mexico.

Heart, Mind & Hard Work

Hello Rikke, Mads, and anyone participating in this hiring process, I am delighted to have the opportunity to present myself as a solid candidate for the Senior Design Educator position. Let me begin by saying thank you, because you all put The IDF together in the first place, and without that, we wouldn't be here today.

I am writing from Guadalajara, the most beautiful city in Mexico. I want to briefly share the story of my design journey hoping that you see why I want to put my heart, mind, and hard work into the role of Senior Design Educator.

I discovered design in 1999 after some soul searching while attending college in Canada. Back then I wasn’t sure what career I wanted to pursue, but ever since discovering my true vocation I have never looked back again.

John Abbott College in Montreal, Canada

I graduated from ITESO design school in 2005 with a thesis in the shape of a book about every student’s initial journey into the field of design. Is available in Amazon, only in Spanish.

ITESO Design School in Guadalajara, Mexico.

The following decade went like this: a couple of Graphic Design freelancing phases, several entrepreneurial efforts that ended in failures or learning experiences and a couple of success stories, including my 1 million dollar revenue hobby; a service design traveling business where I had the fortune to take more than 500 students to China on academic missions to learn design, architecture, industrial and civil engineering, marketing, and international business. That business ended at different times in different circumstances and took several blows such as the 2008 world crisis, the AH1N1 pandemic in 2009, and lastly, the 2012 mexican peso losing ground to the US dollar. By 2013 I had one final academic mission and later I had to shut down the business and figure out what to do next.

While reinventing myself I stumble upon Sir Ken Robinson and Salman Khan in the web, both figures and stories inspired me to dedicate myself to the betterment of education worldwide. Little did I know back then how this inspiration drove me to take the next steps in my career down the road, including this very moment.

In 2014 I started working as a UX/UI designer with a startup that had the mission to revolutionize the supply chain industry. This experience was my ticket to join an IT services company in the USA in 2015, my entry point to the technology industry where I kept learning more about design with topics like Lean UX, Design Sprints, and Agile Development.

That is me in the far left, standing.

Soon after, I joined the mentor-based platforms at Career Foundry and Designlab in 2016 and I have never stopped mentoring since. Here is when I discovered my other passion: Mentoring. As of today, I have mentored over 350 design students from all over the world and I have over 1100 mentoring hours under my belt in areas of UX research, Interaction and UI design, Typography, and Design fundamentals. With over 20 design projects over a wide spectrum of industries in 15 years, I have what it takes to become not only a great design educator but the best. I enjoy where I work today, but I see myself making a bigger impact in a design school, and not an ordinary one. I am ready to embark on a new journey by joining the best design school in the world. As long as I am helping a design school become the best in the world, my heart, my mind, my hard work, and my soul will belong here.

My 3 Productivity hacks

1. Bullet Journaling

This is a growing-in-popularity analog technique that follows the principle described in Don Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things; that Knowledge in the World helps us remember things way easier than anything hidden behind an application inside a screen, thus depending on our own memory resources known as knowledge in the head.

With bullet journaling, paper and pen in hand I am able to go through my monthly, weekly and daily logs in order to prioritize tasks and become aware of my day to day activities and productivity.

2. Centralized and always visible information.

Following the same previous principle, by having a single hub of information always visible to my eyes, either a separate screen monitor or a whiteboard, I am able to see the projects, chunks of work and status of issues or tickets in progress helping me communicate things efficiently and read anyone's statuses and activity remotely in a very efficient manner. Using tools like Jira, Trello, Confluence, Asana, or Monday, even Miro, Mural, or InVision's Freehand these types of tools allow me to do more, quicker, and better.

3. Time blocking

Scheduling is the prerogative of execution. Without putting things on my calendar, I will consider them as unimportant or unprepared ideas. Everything that goes into my calendar is ready for execution. So I tend to have my mornings full of planning sessions, workshops, conference calls, webinars, gatherings, meetings etc.. and leaving my afternoons for personal productive work.

This is the end of my submission.

I hope that I have sparked a bit of curiosity to know me better. I am really looking forward to meeting with you to continue this hiring process.