Marcello A. Gómez Maureira is a researcher and designer, drawn to projects that involve multidisciplinary challenges and the potential to build connections between them. Formally trained as mechanical engineer and video game developer, his ongoing research interests focus on the interplay between humans and interactive technology, as well as the prospects of designing the impact of such technology on society and human affect.

Meer informatie over Marcello Gómez Maureira

Marcello has had a diverse education that frequently put him into new fields and the challenges that come with it. Starting out as pursuing a career in mechanical engineering, he studied the design and manufacturing of precision instruments and ultimately graduated with the development of an automated testing device for the evaluation of toothbrushes.

Inspired by the challenges inherent in design work, Marcello moved to the Netherlands to study video game development at NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences. During his Bachelor, he managed large development teams, while starting to provide commercial work in video game companies next to his studies. His final thesis "SuperTux: A Song of Ice and Metrics" compared testing methodologies for level design in video games, and was awarded the Gerrit van der Veer Award for the best HCI thesis in 2014.

For his Master, Marcello attended the Media Technology programme at Leiden University, where he was able to explore a wide variety of fields at the intersection of technology and its impact on society. During his studies, he published several papers in the areas of HCI, Affective Computing, Virtual Reality research, and entertainment computing in general.

Since then, Marcello has started his PhD at the University of Malta at the Institute of Digital Games, focusing on human curiosity, and the possibilities to quantify and design for it with the help of interactive media. In addition to this, he continues to develop games and playful interfaces as part of the 2-person company 'Dandy Unicorns'.