werpi279's

Beyond art, design and engineering



Welcome! What you may look for is down here

Disclaimer

On this website, neither color nor iconography will influence you. If you're interested, scroll down to continue reading.

Simple observations

I will ask you to take some time to experience the friction1 and determine whether it will help us connect. This is a kind of experiment we can run nowadays. At a time where interfaces direct people, don't let them think2, where everything appears to be the same, and we simply act.

Please provide me with honest criticism on this if you already know me.
Let's connect if you're just passing by; who knows? Maybe good things will happen.
I hope I didn't waste your time if you are an HR.

Premise

If I created this... No. This website was renovated because I felt the need to introduce myself, what I do, and how I work to the public. This doesn't want to be a blog, but something personal and slightly professional. I want to be earnest3 without using the fancy words that we frequently use on social media to gain views. I want to do this my way and feel punk4 about it. The purpose of this is to get to know me personally rather than just letting you evaluate my skills based on a stunning website and impressive portfolio. People are occasionally more than what they can appear to be. Hope I managed to reach my goal. I appreciate you taking the time to read this far.

Ciao.

Nice to have you here. Let me introduce myself: I'm Pier aka werpi279. I'd like to define myself as an experimental designer and code (ab)user, but up to you to give me any label after reading through this. I use those words to describe myself because even if my academic path was in design, I've always been a designer among engineers. It's strange for me, because now I gained mixed experiences and knowledge, but I feel like I don't have a professional identity, and sometimes this may be annoying. I just know what I do, but I have issues describing it even to close friends. By the way, through these experiences, I have gained expertise in mixing various tools or quickly learning new ones (at least the minimum I need for a specific task). The only important thing is to make what's in your mind possible. Or to demonstrate that even if it works, it works badly. That happens too. But this is a good way to learn, I guess.

Before talking about my job and projects, I owe you some apologies: I will not go much into deep detail because some of them are confidential or ongoing. That said, let's move on.

What I like to do while working is to learn. And there's no better way than pushing modern technology to its limits - at least in my opinion. Crafting something brand new with what we have makes you think in a different way, and I do like to misuse stuff to give it new life. Years ago I asked myself: people have used their hands to communicate since ever and designers spend years improving 3D modeling skills. Why don't we combine these two info to solve a problem? It was more complex than this, but you get the idea. I've designed and teamed to prototype a system able to translate people's hand movements and translate them to the 3D object they were describing. From that project, the company I worked for5 made a simplified and commercial product6. Amazing result, I couldn’t imagine a company pushing one of my ideas to the market! But in the end, I wasn't satisfied. For months there had been just that, and no meaningful free time... I began being proud of that several months later. I guess you can enjoy your job, but still need something else to really appreciate everything. At least I do.

Currently, I'm working at Politecnico di Milano university7, where I had to face one of the biggest challenges ever met: loneliness. One full year of research alone. One full floor with nobody, but me. Hardest time ever. But working with driving simulators I couldn't work-from-home that much (that is being alone, but at home). Music somehow helped me. My main field of work is researching and prototyping new interaction modalities. In particular with gesture, haptic and autonomous vehicles. Here I have the opportunity to work with driving simulators (and built one, the internal vehicle interface sensor part at least), where I conduct my research and prototypes. The main project I've worked on was BASE5G8, a regionally funded project about 5G potential. Imagining autonomous carsharing in 2030, we decided to use the whole windscreen to project infotainment - movies, presentations, or whatever people do with a tablet or phone. In this scenario, the seat will be in a comfortable position: further away, more sloping. So, how are we going to interact with the new interface? We won't be able to reach the instrument cluster from that position. Gestures and voice control may solve it. Within this project, I've designed a way to interact with the projected interface through custom gestures. I then added haptic feedback to simulate the touching of icons or elements of the infotainment interface. The project ended with a simulated experience in an immersive scenario and a quantitative. That was important to define if the new gesture pattern was intuitive and if the sensor position was correct and mark differences with state of art interfaces9.
(PS: now the lab is full and sometimes colleagues from other departments ask us to be hosted. I guess that means there is a great environment down there!)

With Politecnico, I'm collaborating to help Huawei Automotive10 design, prototype, test, and implement their future in-car interfaces, improving the passengers' experience as much as possible.

Lastly, I care about ethics, inclusivity, and the correct use of technology. This brought me to teamwork and write a book chapter11 about autonomous vehicle ethics and vulnerable users.

We finally arrived at the part where I'm supposed to tell you what I've learned from all of that, right? Well, I'm not sure if it's easy to say or trivial, but here are my main three. One: Working with different people from your mindset is hard but great. It pushes you to learn something new, see things from a different perspective and it creates cool conversations. Two: having different assets in your toolbox is useless if you only use them as they are designed. Hack things, bend them under your logic, and not vice-versa. Three: work shift is pointless and working whenever you like is priceless, but it is important to have time to decompress by doing something you enjoy. During and/or after the shift.

In my free time, I bring on several personal projects. Some of them go into the trash can (most of them actually), and some survive. I enjoy doing audio-reactive visuals (something that frees my creative side and truly relaxes me), creating simple experimental apps (I enjoy doing this because they bring my ideas or concepts to life), making electronic music (sounds are amazing, and combining them makes me realize that what I like to make is not what I like to listen to), and much more. Or simply, hang out.

Ok. I've talked for too much. If you feel like it, tell me about yourself.
Bye!

References

  1. Friction
  2. Don't let me think
  3. Earnest
  4. Punk
  5. The company I worked for
  6. The product they made
  7. Politecnico di Milano
  8. BASE5G
  9. Test results
  10. Huawei Automotive
  11. The book chapter about ethics

More about me

E-mail: an old-fashioned way to start a conversation

CV: what I did in a nutshell
GitHub: to see, replicate, and improve some old project
Instagram: to see my passions, tests, and what fascinates me
LinkedIn: the professional profile many have
YouTube: videos I make and like
SoundCloud: random music samples, and a variety of saved songs

Bonus

My old website, people somehow used to enjoy (may not 100% work)
A poetry project: code, destruction, recreation (beta)




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