É. Urcades
🥨

É. Urcades

Product Design/Research in New York City

!!!!

A year ago

I'm interested in the redefinition of the personal computer.
I'm working on that at Tlon.

Contact

Email
Website
GitHub

Teams

Current
Tlon Corporation

Work Experience

2019 — Now
Remote/New York City, New York

Designing a new networking protocol, operating system, app suite, software ecosystem, and corporate design approach from 0 to 1. Contributed directly to 10x-ing the size of the Urbit network from 2022 to 2023.

2022 — Now
Online

A para-R&D organization collecting fees for good work.

2017 — Now
New York City, New York

Design, strategy, and research consulting group.

2019 — 2020
San Francisco, California

Experimental self care software, proto-LLM interfaces, and Backyard.

2018 — 2019
Adjunct Faculty at Parsons School of Design
New York City, New York
2015 — 2018
New York City, New York

Cross-app product design for Discovery, Messaging, Safety, Groups, and Identity on Tumblr.

2013 — 2015
Austin, Texas

Internal design education, design consulting, and various B2B products.

Projects

Ongoing

An OS-like client interface for Urbit computers. Our current thesis and "vessel" for what constitutes a next-generation operating system.

Read more about the process of designing Landscape here: urcad.es/writing/230727

Ongoing

A simple p2p messaging app, built on Urbit. An actually-owned answer to Signal.

Ongoing

Futuristic "group chat app" featuring arbitrary channel types and customization that actually matters. Intended for assembling local internets.

2019
Pilot at Samara

Pilot was a mobile application designed to facilitate self-reflection, personal growth, and forming a story of your life through a simple prompt/question-oriented interface.

Pilot preceded the development of chat interfaces for LLMs, but was prescient in acknowledging how people would come to interact with these systems.

In a collaboration with Samara's writer's room, hardware engineers, an iOS dev, and Joe Gebbia, I designed new interfaces and input mechanisms between people and artificial intelligence, and strategies for how to incorporate data gleaned from people's lives into recommendation systems for Airbnb and Backyard.

2019

I worked with Samara's engineers and real estate research team to prototype a system and interfaces for configuring modular Backyard units, situating them in real map-space, and calculating costs/price/revenue according to municipal + state real estate markets.

2015

A surface with various layers that provide wireless charging may include at least one of a top surface layer, a second layer, comprising a plurality of lights and a power grid, disposed under the top surface layer, a charging pad disposed on a portion of the power grid, and a third layer, comprising a power supply which provides power to the plurality of lights and the power grid, disposed under the second layer.

Side Projects

2018
“Being a Body” at METRO Library Council

with Callil Capuozzo and Sarah Hamerman

Writing

2020

A reflection–meditation on OS 1’s initial form development, and the attitude we brought to bear in designing it.

2018

"Conceptual wandering as a way to find and make meaning"

Speaking

2023
Online

Artists, Designers, Writers, and Makers are invited to share their ideas on what it means to push culture forward today with values of community, curiosity, care, and partnership at the forefront.

Those invited are imagining new ways of shaping brand and design, pushing the boundaries within their profession, and leading practices that resist rigid definition and reflect the sentiment of our time.

I spoke about designing interfaces for a new conception of an internet, and the human body in digital space.