Romain Simon Collaud

Romain is an Art Director living in Fribourg, Switzerland. In 2013, he received a BA in visual communication from ECAL & in 2017, earned a MAS in design research for digital innovation from the EPFL ECAL Lab.He believes that design should be intuitive & revolve around the user. To strengthen this, he learned inclusive design methodologies at the RCA & honed his skills in icon design at the University of Bournemouth. For the latter, he manipulated icons’ aesthetics to evaluate their effect on perceived usability. Many of his projects deal with notions of big data, data visualization & search algorithms. These play a large role in his research work, where he explores navigation principles & aggregation of content in mass information environments. Currently, he is working on a major social network system for elderly people, as well as a digital exhibition whose narrative navigation as well as interactions with literary artifacts create a unique relationship with visitors.Romain is methodical, logical, detail-oriented & a bit of a perfectionist. For his BA thesis, he explored the omnipresence of the grid in daily visual landscapes. After that, he worked as a graphic designer at ECAL for its communication as well as a freelancer for other organisations. He also co-founded a workshop that specializes in graphic design for unique mediums as well as a design collective for conceptual ideas. Today, he works at EPFL ECAL Lab – the EPFL design research center – where he confronts his point of view with engineers & psychologists.