leading expert in the development of Flash-based wireless platforms, and wrote a book on designing interfaces for mobile devices using Flash. Microsoft took notice and in 2003 offered him a job at their sprawling Redmond, Washington, headquarters. Over the next 14 years, de los Reyes would hold senior design positions in virtually every major division at Microsoft. He worked on such projects as MSN, Windows, Surface, and Xbox. On the front lines of the development of Natural User Interface, or NUI (think touch screens), he’s one of a handful of designers referenced on the NUI Wikipedia page. He became an affiliate faculty member of the Design Division at the University of Washington, a position he still holds today, and has lectured around the world at institutions that include MIT, University of Toronto, University of Ljubljana, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and the University of Southern California. A common theme at the center of many of de los Reyes’ lectures is his anthropological view of design as a fundamental human drive. “Design is a dissatisfaction with the status quo,” he says. “It’s a willingness to make changes to our current situation in order to improve it. Design is about envisioning a preferred future, and taking steps toward realizing it.”
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De los Reyes has little recollection of the weeks following his surgery. He was in the neuro-ICU, often medicated to the point of delusion. At one point, he thought he was conducting a photo shoot for an Argentinian grocer, and 18 • B E N N I N G T O N M A G A Z I N E
that he was being paid in a very rare honey. Some things his family tells him, other things they don’t. He spent hours every day in a full-torso cast, his body wrapped in bandages to keep his blood pressure up, being rolled back and forth to avoid bed sores. After nearly two months, he was finally transferred to a rehabilitation unit, where he spent another month preparing for day-to-day life in a wheelchair. His sister helped him find a first-floor, wheel-chair-accessible apartment, and by mid-September, he was home. The world that de los Reyes returned to, he quickly found, was not designed for him. Even things that met ADA (American Disabilities Act) standards were often thoughtlessly arranged. While a handicap parking space may indeed be the closest spot to a building’s entrance, that matters little when an abutting dumpster makes the deployment of a wheelchair ramp impossible. The frequency of unnecessary inconveniences he experienced on a day-to-day basis astonished him. And they all had one thing in common: bad design. After three more months of intensive physical, occupational, and vocational therapy at home, de los Reyes returned to work. Microsoft, in the meantime, had adapted his entire office building—doors, elevators, bathroom stalls—to make it wheelchair accessible. De los Reyes was no doubt appreciative, but still couldn’t help but wonder: Why weren’t the rest of the 120 buildings on campus like this? Why aren’t buildings designed for inclusion to begin with? De los Reyes found that the changes made to his office were, in fact, beneficial to everyone. For someone carrying a tray of coffee in one hand and a laptop case in the other,