David is a seasoned designer and publicist from Bogota, driven by curiosity about the intersection and possibilities of participatory design, future-centered projects and interdisciplinary collaboration.
His work spans from educational initiatives to public design innovation, exploring new ways to create meaningful and impactful experiences.
Learning Spaces Future Design
Provotypes
Challenge
We live in a world where everything is personalized—our music, our shopping, our entertainment. But education? It’s still one-size-fits-all. Externado University sought to anticipate the challenges of higher education in 2034, aiming to understand how learning should evolve for future generations.
Through a series of workshops, an interactive collaborative survey and on-site participatory totems, students and professionals from different disciplines envisioned their learning preferences, ideal classroom settings, and personal education goals. Participants were asked to “apply for university in 2034”—a speculative experiment where, they received a personalized university application for 2034, reflecting how their learning experience could be structured in the future, and how the system must evolve to accommodate them.
To address this goal, we co-created Lab-Aula, an experimental and participatory research framed within our LUX laboratory methodology. Designed as a hybrid playful research tool, Lab-Aula invited participants to explore and express their ideas, desires, and interests about the future of learning through both digital and analog experiences.
Three rotating totems, each with three levels and four faces per cube, allowing participants to explore diverse scenarios by voting and discussing interactions, models, and technology in the future of education.
Categories
Level 1: Learning Spaces & Governance
Level 2: Paths & Certification
Level 3: Technology & Human Interaction
Questions
Where does learning happen?
(campus, hybrid, fully digital, community hubs)
How do students interact?
(solo study, peer-driven, AI tutors, groups)
Who controls education?
(universities, students, AI, decentralized governance)
Methodology
How is learning structured?
(degrees, modular learning, project-based, lifelong)
How is knowledge validated?
(exams, portfolios, AI-skills, micro-certifications)
What role does AI play?
(minimal, assistive, adaptive, fully autonomous)
[Analogue machine
Lab-Aula
I led the research for surveys and interactions, shaping the methodology behind the totems and defining how participants would engage with future education scenarios.
Developed the participatory methods that encouraged active discussion and voting, and ensured the research translated into actionable insights.
In healthcare services, waiting is often associated with stress, anxiety, and inactivity. At Instituto Roosevelt in Bogotá, we asked: How can we transform waiting time into an enriching and relaxing experience rather than a frustrating pause?
Waiting Garden is a project aimed at reshaping the perception of waiting time through nature-inspired furniture and interactive devices that connect patients and their companions with the surrounding environment. By leveraging the ecosystem services of the nearby Cerro, we created a multisensory experience that promotes relaxation, learning, and contemplation.
Nature-based environments improve emotional well-being in healthcare, transforming passive waiting spaces into interactive, sensory experiences with simple interventions.
Contemplative Furniture
Haptic tour [C] Interactive Nature Exploration
Comfortable, modular seating that encourages rest, quiet observation, and mindfulness, turning waiting areas into welcoming and stress-reducing spaces.
Through digital and analog interactive tools, patients can identify the flora and fauna of the nearby ecosystem, fostering a sense of connection with nature while they wait.
User-centered design strategy, ensuring accessibility and comfort. Patients and medical staff were involved to validate the proposal.
A wellness approach
Stress Reduction Through Nature:
Inspired by biophilic design, the project integrates natural elements, textures, and calming view of Bogota’s skyline to create a sense of tranquility, reducing anxiety in patients and their families.
A centralized digital ecosystem that streamlines access to key information about courses, workshops and projects, enhances collaboration between students, teachers and partners, and promotes open innovation. The approach was structured in three strategic layers to address usability, engagement, and community ownership.
Despite hosting multiple innovation and experimentation initiatives, TadeoLab—the innovation lab of Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano—lacked a digital ecosystem to organize, centralize, and make its processes visible. This absence resulted in: scattered information, limited community engagement and inefficient project diffusion.
To ensure a frictionless adoption process, the app’s onboarding flow:
• Helped users quickly understand how to explore opportunities, manage projects, and connect with collaborators.
• Instead of overwhelming users with all features at once, we designed a progressive onboarding flow, presenting key actions step by step.
Simplified access to information increases student and faculty participation in innovation programs up to 40%.
Interactive, modular design ensures adaptability, allowing for continuous platform evolution.
My role
I led the research and interaction design, focusing on:
Structuring the UX strategy, aligning user needs with an intuitive platform, through interviews and surveys.
Developing service blueprints, mapping out key interactions and system integrations.
Facilitating participatory workshops, gathering insights from students, faculty, and researchers.
Conducting testings in Maze, to ensure flows consistency, usability and rapid feedback.
The Down Syndrome Foundation wanted to explore a neurodiversity-based methodology to foster teamwork, enhance engagement, and facilitate learning through their students daily activities, such as dehydrating fruit to sell. However, traditional lessons often felt disconnected from their experiences which makes learning a difficult and abstract process to them. Instead of introducing abstract concepts, we used fruit as a familiar, tangible element to help them explore, connect, and draw relationships between taste, sound, and color, making concept learning more intuitive and clear.
Fruvotipando is a multisensory, playful experience where fruits, colors and sounds became the key medium to explore and communicate their perceptions about abstract concepts. Using the provotyping approach, we built low-fidelity, experience-driven prototypes to test how sensory stimuli could improve concept association and teamwork.
Identify differences in texture, color, aroma, and shape
Classify, associate, and understand relationships between elements.
A tested, adaptable methodology that enhances a validated, neurodiversity-based approach to teaching productive processes through interaction and experience. Workshops
Combine fruits, flavors, and textures to construct new associations and narratives.
• Developed the provotyping methodology, ensuring quick testing and iteration.
• Structured participatory workshops, fostering collaboration.
• Designed interaction flows and devices making the experience both engaging and educational. My role
Fruits as a hands-on tool made abstract concepts as “sweet/acid and grave/sharp” more tangible and easy to understand.
Testing different sensory interactions helped refine and prioritize the phases of the methodology in real time.
After the 6 sessions, participants were able to clasify and compare fruits by bitterness or by their own categories.
In Bogotá, 70% of women caregivers were not participating in the city’s “Manzanas del Cuidado” program—an initiative providing free education, well-being, and economic empowerment services for unpaid caregivers. The primary barriers? Lack of clear information, digital accessibility issues, and difficulty navigating the registration and service availability process.
We redesigned and automated the enrollment experience by developing an AI-powered chatbot, which simplified access to program information, service registration, and location guidance. This digital solution was designed with a human-centered, community-driven approach to ensure its adoption among caregivers with diverse technological literacy levels.
项目六 / 六
Infectious Diseases Movii Redesign Bosquespejo
Instructional Design
User Interface Public Design
The PAHO (Pan American Health Organization) aimed to strengthen the technical and practical knowledge of healthcare professionals in Neglected Infectious Diseases (NID), enhancing epidemiological surveillance and case management at local and regional levels. To achieve this, we designed +10 pedagogical materials that ensured effective, interactive, and engaging virtual learning, incorporating methodologies such as gamification, simulations, and case studies under the ADDIE model (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation).
Instructional Design
E-learning
Movii is a digital wallet, but its home screen was overloaded with information, making it difficult to quickly access essential features like transfers, top-ups, and payments. The lack of hierarchy and an unintuitive experience caused frustration, impacting user retention and loyalty. The challenge was to redesign a more accessible, intuitive, and user-centered interface aligned with real user needs.
