Rodriguez

Can you talk about that soul searching more? What was that like for you?

Coming into grad school, you’re automatically in awe of the people around you because you see them as the best of the best and everyone seems to have this real sense of identity: I care about physical craft of books. I’m obsessed with typography. People have these identities and I didn’t have mine so I just felt lost. I was trying all these different hats on. I was interested in everything. There was nothing that was boring. I was probably the only person who did all of the summer reading. I sat there and I highlighted and took notes. I wanted to give myself as much potential to succeed as possible. It’s funny in retrospect because I had a little blog and I’d go back to that and look for themes and patterns looking for something coming up often that I could then reflect and kind of retroactively identify as a passion. That right there, should have told me that research was what I was passionate about!

How did that come together for you?

I did a project in grad school around Second Life.

I was fascinated by this totally virtual world. I found out that there are people who are more comfortable in Second Life than they are in the physical world and it broke my heart that people want to be so immersed in this virtual world because that’s where they live their best life. I felt this heavy responsibility as a designer because those experiences are only as good as we design them to be. There has to be so much more thought and purpose to the design of the buddy list, for example. Can it be as amazing as possible as opposed to, at the time, looking like AOL Instant Messenger. I started getting really passionate about how we can design for the best experiences possible to meet these people’s goals.

So futurism is a big part of my identity. I was recently appointed a master inventor at IBM. This is someone who is creating new intellectual property and forecasting where everything is going. That’s such a reaffirming part of my identity to be contributing to the trajectory of technology.

What are you working on now?

Part of a mission that I have is to create an army of designers that feels empowered to have more of a voice on what the future of human computer interaction looks like. Nobody is more tuned in to the problems and opportunity areas that users currently have on the cloud than designers. And right now, I think too many designers that I work with feel unempowered. So something that I’m currently working on is supporting a force of designers who feel like they can forge the future in ways that are empowering.