My business trip to Belgium is nearing it’s end. It’s been a productive three weeks with a lot going on. Now the time comes to return back to Mexico. I can look back at a productive period where I got lots of work done and set up the logic for the rest of the year for Obra Studio.

• I gave two talks: a talk about designing with AI at Mobile Vikings and a guest class about understanding user interface design at Artevelde in Ghent (the pandemic version of that talk is here)
• I met my startup client Beam and had some real-life workshops/work sessions to move the startup into the right direction
• I had some great talks with agency founders, thanks Bert, Pieter-Jan and Thomas for the great discussions.
• I had some great conversations with a person who is helping me with business development. He is helping me much more than he realizes (you know who you are!)
• I met some prospective team members and potential business partners, and I signed the first Obra employment contract (more on that below)
• We signed the first medium-sized project, with some interesting leads for bigger projects. Surprisingly there are quite some leads from the US, which is a great signal.

Over the past next days I will be posting about some conclusions from the trip, both in company positioning, hiring and in the vision of how to incorporate AI into design going forward.