Jorge Furuya
User Experience Design
...Yours truly
About
I am a user experience / interaction designer with a background on industrial design and ethnographic inspired research. During the last 10 years I have been working in the mobile communications / computing industry at some great and innovative companies like Sony Mobile, HTC and Google. Currently I am a director of user experience at Samsung.
Here at Samsung I lead the "lifestyle" track. a team of designers and researchers that focus on designing interactive experiences that blend into our user's homes. For all the products that the team focuses on: from smart TVs to connected appliances I am a constant advocate to maintain an ethos of "calm technology" through the larger Samsung organization including our executive leadership team. some products that my team have released recently include Family Hub 2.0 (https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-unveils-family-hub-2-0-and-smart-built-in-appliances-at-ces-2017) and The Frame (https://www.cnet.com/products/samsung-the-frame/preview/).
At Google I led the design efforts on the android platform both for imaging and for the input methods framework on android, including the design of the standard android IME and the redesign of the language & input settings and support for HW accessories. I have also designed HW accessories under the Nexus initiative.
Most recently I work for the Android Auto initiative: http://www.android.com/auto/
At HTC my role was as the lead user experience designer for imaging. what this means is that for every time you interact with a photo or a user recorded video on one of our devices (Like the htc One series) I have spent some time with our user research, engineering, visual design, planning and marketing teams to try to make your experience rich, simple and enjoyable.
Before at Sony Mobile I handled a number of different areas and applications such as imaging, eBook reader clients for the Sony reader store, media managers and content aggregation apps. I also was lucky enough to work on the design of the Playstation suite for the Xperia play, the first mobile phone running Playstation games.
Before mobile
Before my dive into the world of mobile devices I spent year and a half working for IDEO in projects for different clients such as Acer, BBVA, Ford, Microsoft and Visa.
During this time I spent time in the front line preparing and executing qualitative user research, helping host participative design workshops, synthesizing information and creating concepts for products and services.
I also had the chance to intern at Atlas-Copco and help develop the ux style and visual language for their products while pursuing my masters degree.
Before this back in Mexico my professional experience started when I joined In/Situm an innovation consultancy to help carry out projects involving concept generation and user research. I also spent some time with Made, an industrial design agency developing projects for the medical and automotive industries.
My educational background
I had the opportunity to attend two amazing design schools with a leading vision for creativity and the social implications of design: Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden, where I got my MA and CIDI-UNAM in Mexico city where I first got my Industrial design bachelors degree.