
Ubi de Feo

Ubi de Feo (born 1974, in Italy) is a Creative Technologist and educator. In his off-time (mostly when doing the dishes) he thinks about ways to improve things or invent new ones. Curiosity drives everything in his life and work. In 2007 de Feo began teaching programming, electronics and other things to whoever wants to learn, often developing his own methods to explain really complicated things in a more tangible, down-to-earth fashion. He does do not try to teach things he doesn’t thoroughly understand, which often leads him to learn entirely new subjects in order to explain them to himself and others.
Education.
"I have learned most of what I know by interacting with people far from my location. Internet has been my campus and will be till the end of one of us two, be it mine or the internet's," Ubi de Feo. From 1993-1995 de Feo was enrolled at the University in Salerno (IT) where he studied Electrical and Electronics Engineering. Bored with that track he dropped out and switched his focus to Social Studies. In 1995 he was drafted into the Navy. Shortly thereafter de Feo was in a serious Vespa accident and spent six months in bed recovering and thinking.
Professional life.
In 2000 de Feo became a professional creative coder. He began experimenting with mobile devices in 2001. In 2002 he moved to Amsterdam where he worked as a Creative Technologist for Wieden+Kenney [W+K interaction design lab startup], set up the collective Hello, Savants! [a fellowship of creative people with unique disabilities and unexpected talents], and went to work for himself as twodotone. In this range of capacities de Feo produced both personal and commercial projects that span disciplines from teaching and coding to sound and animation while developing projects for Nike, Nokia [Nokia Flagship Stores Bluetooth Framework], Gore-Tex, Heineken, Bottega Veneta, Mandarina Duck, Electronic Arts, Reebok, MTV networks, Nationaal Historisch Museum Amsterdam, Belastingdienst and many more. Currently de Feo is the Director of Secret Space Program at MediaMonks and is a 2015 visiting faculty at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID).
Teaching.
Ubi de Feo's project “from 0 to C” is a series of workshops – and a framework of objects, methods, stories and games – that aim at teaching programming using a more creative, human approach. Through the use of tangible, hand-made objects, “from 0 to C” attempts to establish a clear understanding of how a computer works and what a programming language actually is.
During years of teaching—or trying to teach—Arduino coding to creatives, de Feo ran into the following scenarios: “For the beginner, the artist, the industrial designer who wants to start prototyping, [the difficulties of learning to code] can appear as walls they constantly have to crash against,” de Feo observed. “If you ask them why, most of the times the answer will be something along the lines of I’m a creative person, this structured stuff is not for me." His Arduino courses at Mediamatic with Massimo Banzi revealed "a really steep entry curve" barrier and further motivated de Feo to develop a new approach. "People got really really excited about the electronic part of it and the entry of the code was really complex. I have studied so many languages that I have learnt a lot of tricks and things that could be useful in learning a new programming language. I wanted to teach people Arduino but I wanted to teach them really really well." Realizing that the conventional approach to teaching coding was not working for the [creative] type of student, de Feo created “From 0 to C,” starting with a rather radical step: Removing all of the computers from the classroom. Instead, he introduced physical objects the students are meant to interact with.“From 0 to C” allows people to visualize what happens inside the computer when a program runs – how bytes are moved around and manipulated by the program.
Regarding the “From 0 to C”outcomes, de Feo explains, "The scope of this primer is not teaching you to be the best coder or hacker, but to be one who knows what you are dealing with and has a better attitude towards problem solving." "After learning the ins and outs of how stupid computers actually are, [Ubi]’s students then learn the syntax of a language of their choice (C, JavaScript, or Python, for example), and write a few programs."
Ubi de Feo has taught the Introduction to Electronics class at CIID (Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design) in both 2015 and 2016 during their Interaction Design Programme.