Since I was a kid,
I was fascinated by letters,
words,
the musicality of language.
One day,
looking through a bus window,
I thought I saw letters raining.
Since then, letters have been raining inside my head.
I was also obsessed with ink, with pouring my rain onto the blank paper.
I wanted to be a writer.
Secretly,
a poet.
Writing was the bassline of my life (courses in narrative, structure, storytelling and creative writing).
I also played music for 10 years.
The trombone.
I always hear music in my head.
But when the time came to choose what to do with my life,
something was obvious:
who can live from poetry?
I was also intrigued by computers.
My parents convinced me to study computer engineering.
That day, it was pouring letters.
Computer engineering, huh?
Suddenly,
there were numbers floating everywhere.
Already in my first year of university,
ones and zeros were raining so heavily
that I could barely see the letters,
or the other numbers.
Can you find some?
When I wanted to concentrate on programming,
I couldn't, because letters were raining and I had to write to get them out of my head.
I dreamt of a red umbrella that could protect me from the letters,
so I could get the numbers into a bucket.
Yes. I think that is when I started to think about buckets.
One bucket for the letters.
One bucket for the numbers.
And one special bucket only for ones and zeros.
The problem is that many times they were mixed.
That separation allowed me to have poetry moments.
During those times, words were raining and I played to catch them.
The poems didn't make sense.
But it was so much fun to catch them!
Other times I was coding.
The words dropped in a very structured way, in blocks.
There was comfort in that structure.
In my mind I could hear the click when each block fitted into the next one.
It took me many years to learn to distinguish the buckets.
There was chaos in my head,
and many times it was confusing,
but I learned to separate them.
And then, I started to
see the connection between all of them.
I saw in the rain how the numbers were connected to the letters.
That was...
BEAUTIFUL.
I think it was because one day,
during a heavy rain of numbers,
I saw the word...
POETRY with numbers.
Can you believe it?
Sometimes I joke to myself,
and think that that day I saw
POETRY
That is when I started to embrace it all.
The connections. The heavy rain.
The numbers. The letters.
You are welcome. And you. And you.
I had learned to appreciate them.
Then I studied interaction design and game design in Sweden,
embracing all my interests.
Art, numbers and letters:
I could finally combine all my interests.
After some years of working in Sweden,
I saw the opportunity
to do RESEARCH
and go much deeper into my interests.
Oh, sorry. Where are my manners?
I got carried away.
Hello, my name is
Álvaro Aranda Muñoz.
And I don't usually talk much. I'm more on the introvert side.
But there are so many thoughts words letters numbers in my head…
And this is my portfolio, the place where I gather my CV and some of my thoughts and projects.
Nice to meet you.
Do you want to know more about what I do?
PhD in Innovation and Design · Computer Engineer · Futurist · Storyteller · Interaction Designer · User Experience