The heart of every conference are the speakers, the people who offer us new perspectives, teach us new methods, and inspire us to think big. We’re proud to present these Interaction10 Speakers to you.
Gretchen Anderson, LUNAR
As LUNAR’s Director of User Interface Design, Gretchen Anderson designs products that are as pleasurable to use as they are powerful in expression. She seeks out those design challenges that ultimately make a positive impact on people’s daily lives and environment. With a design philosophy rooted in the belief that a user interface should be seamless and invisible, she has designed a wide variety of products and experiences: from medical devices to casino entertainment to business productivity tools. Gretchen graduated with honors from Harvard University. Her experience spans 15 years, and prior to joining LUNAR, she worked for several Bay Area design consultancies. Her clients include: Johnson & Johnson, TurboChef, Microsoft, Virgin Records and HP. She also enjoys teaching design and research methodologies to fellow designers and business people alike.
Paola Antonelli is senior curator of architecture and design at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she has worked since 1994. Before MoMA, she curated design and architecture exhibitions in many countries and worked as contributing editor for Domus magazine and design editor of Abitare. She has lectured on design and architecture worldwide and has published numerous articles in publications ranging from Seed and Nest to The Harvard Design Review. Antonelli is author of a number of books, including Workspheres (2001), Objects of Design from the Modern Museum of Art (2003), Humble Masterpieces (2005), and Design and the Elastic Mind (2008).
Timo Arnall is a designer working with interactive products and media. Timo leads an international research project on mobile technology, collaborates on interaction design work and lectures in design, media and technology.
Timo’s work spans design, media and technology; interested in the ways in which products are used in everyday life, the emergent uses of new technologies and the design of products and services in local contexts and situations.
Timo’s history of design work has included projects on the web, location-based and mobile services, film and interactive television production, art direction, motion graphics, installations and exhibitions.
Chris Avore is an interaction designer in the Washington DC area, specializing in usable interface design and information architecture.
After years of working independently, he grew tired of asking his bulldog for persona advice and began pestering other user experience designers for feedback, and thus UX Show & Tell was, well, you get the idea.
Elizabeth Bacon discovered her calling with Interaction Design in the late ‘90s when she became a consultant at Cooper. There, she led projects in various domains, supervised design teams and also taught Cooper U. Following Cooper, Liz spent five years leading IxD efforts at St. Jude Medical, a Fortune 100 medical device company. In 2007, Liz co-founded Devise, a digital product design and development consultancy based in Portland, Oregon. She is passionate about the power of IxD to better the world, and has served on the IxDA Board of Directors for the past several years. In her spare time Liz loves autocross racing and writing poetry. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English and French Literature from Stanford University and a Master’s degree in Industrial Arts from San Francisco State University.
Richard Banks is a senior interaction designer for Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. He’s part of a team that spends most of its time looking at family life, trying to understand the complexities of home, in order to figure out how the digital should fit in appropriately. Richard joined Microsoft (quite a while ago) after graduating from the Royal College of Art in London. Since then he’s worked as a design manager in Seattle on Microsoft’s Office, Windows and MSN products before moving home and into research.
Massimo Banzi is the co-founder of the Arduino project and CTO of tinker.it. He has worked for clients such as: Prada, Artemide, Persol, Whirlpool, V&A Museum and Adidas.
He spent 4 years at the Interaction Design Institue Ivrea as Associate Professor. Massimo has taught workshops and has been a guest speaker at institutions like: Architectural Association – London, Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel, Hochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd, FH Potsdam, Domus Academy, Medialab Madrid, Escola Superior de Disseny Barcelona, ARS Electronica Linz, Mediamatic Amsterdam, Doors of Perception Amsterdam.
Before joining IDII he was CTO for the Seat Ventures incubator. He spent many years working as a software architect,both in Milan and London, on projects for clients like Italia Online, Sapient, Labour Party, BT, MCI WorldCom, SmithKlineBeecham, Storagetek, BSkyB and boo.com.
Steve Baty is the founder of UX Book Club and one of the coordinators for the Sydney UX Book Club group. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Interaction Design Association; is a contributing editor for Johnny Holland; editor of Boxes & Arrows; contributor to UXmatters; and organizer of the UX Australia conference. Steve is a practitioner with over a decade of experience and a passion for solving problems through design. He likes to go fishing, but doesn’t get to very often.
Fred Beecher is a Senior User Experience Consultant at Evantage Consulting in Minneapolis. Fred has been working in the user experience design industry for 11 year, doing research, information architecture, interaction design, and usability evaluation for a diverse array of clients like Medtronic, UnitedHealthcare, 3M, RBC Dain Rauscher, General Mills, Thomson Reuters, and the National Marrow Donor Program.
A recognized expert in rapid prototyping, Fred speaks frequently on the topic at national professional conferences and local user experience group meetings. In 2007, Fred developed the official training program for the Axure RP Pro rapid prototyping tool at the request of the makers. He has since trained additional consultants to give the courses and currently leads a broader Axure training program for Evantage.
Solomon Bisker, Carnegie Mellon/School of Architecture
Solomon Bisker is a student at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), where he is pursuing a Masters of Tangible of Interaction Design focusing on design for the built environment. Before that, he worked as an interaction designer at Cambridge Systematics, consulting with federal and state transportation agencies to explore how their processes and public interactions could be improved by technology. Before THAT, he conducted research into mobile barcode interaction design in crowds and public spaces with MIT’s Mobile Experience Lab, part of the MIT Design Lab. He has a BS and M.Eng in Computer Science from MIT.
Nate Bolt serves as El Presidente of Bolt | Peters where he is fascinated by the role of research and design in our lives. He has overseen hundreds of user experience projects for Sony, Oracle, Volkswagen, Greenpeace, and others. He is co-author of the Rosenfeld book, Remote Research, and created the world’s first moderated remote testing software in 2003, Ethnio, which is now being used around the world to recruit hundreds of thousands of live participants for research.
Nate gives talks about research and design in both commercial and academic settings, including a recent keynote for the Urban Libraries Council. Last century, he worked with faculty at the University of California, San Diego, to create a degree titled “Digital Technology and Society,” which focused on the social impact of technology. He also completed a year of communications studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he failed every class, and was jailed briefly for playing drums in public without a license.
MJ (Mary Jane) Broadbent has been designing elegant solutions to complex information problems for over 20 years. With a traditional graphic design education, MJ began interaction design work in 1996 with Silicon Alley pioneer Tom Nicholson. Throughout her career, she has improved communications for clients such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bookspan (now DirectGroup Bertelsmann), Empire BlueCrossBlueShield, H&R Block, The McGraw-Hill Companies (including Standard & Poor’s), Pfizer, Sony Electronics, The United Nations, and Xerox. In her current role as a lead experience designer at Liquidnet, the global institutional equity marketplace, MJ stays busy envisioning streamlined enterprise service systems. She is an active member of numerous design-related organizations and communities; however, IxDA tops the list.
MJ co-authored and taught the seminal online course “Information Design” at Sessions.edu, and has guest-lectured on information architecture at Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education, New York University’s ITP, and the School of Visual Arts. MJ has been passionate about encouraging creative expression ever since reading “The Little Engine That Could” at age 6.
Federico Casalegno, Ph.D., is the Director of the MIT Mobile Experience Lab and Associate Director of the MIT Design Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 2006, he is the director of the Green Home Alliance between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy.
A social scientist with an interest in the impact of networked digital technologies in human behavior and society, Casalegno both teaches and leads research at MIT, especially focusing on the area of rethinking and designing interactive media to foster connections between people, information and physical places using cutting-edge information technology.
Cindy has been exploring ways to engage an audience through storytelling, teaching, writing and design for over twelve years. Just recently she took on the role of Creative Director, Experience Architecture at Rapp, a global, full-service agency based in NYC. She’s led projects for clients ranging from BBC Worldwide to Showtime, Fuse, Madison Square Garden, Coca-Cola and Unilever.
Cindy earned an MFA in screenwriting from Columbia University in New York and a BS in Radio, TV, Film from Northwestern University. In addition to moonlighting as a filmmaker and screenwriter, she is in the process of researching a book that explores how the elements of story can be used as a framework for design. She also coordinates UX Bookclub NYC.
Kevin Cheng splits his crayon time between many endeavors. He is a product manager at Twitter, the co-founder and artist for OK/ Cancel, a webcomic on user experience, and the author of the upcoming book, See What I Mean: How to Communicate Ideas with Comics. Most recently, he is also co-produced an iPhone augmented reality ghost hunting game. Kevin blogs at kevnull.com and has been known to Twitter as @k.
Allan Chochinov is a partner of Core77, a New York-based design network serving a global community of designers and design enthusiasts. He is the editor-in-chief of Core77.com, the widely read design website, Coroflot.com design job and portfolio site, and DesignDirectory.com design firm database. He has been named on numerous design and utility patents, and has received awards from I.D. Magazine, Communication Arts, The Art Directors Club and The One Club. He teaches in the graduate departments of Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Maria Cordell is Principal User Experience Architect at Macquarium in Atlanta. In a career that dates way back, Maria has led and produced numerous successful enterprise software and Web design projects–from corporate Web sites to enterprise-class rich Internet applications and desktop apps–for companies in telecommunications, industrial wireless data transmission, retail sales, terminal server optimization, and optical physics. Maria holds an MS in Information Design and a BS in Physics, both from Georgia Tech. She’s an avid photographer, auto racer, gardener, and amateur radio operator, and the main instigator
behind IxDA Atlanta.
Matt Cottam has been responsible for setting strategic direction for Tellart since co-founding the company in 1999. He provides both inspiration and direction through active involvement in client projects, academic research and teaching, as well as international design and technology conferences worldwide.
With Tellart Matt has directed design and strategy projects for clients including Nokia Design, Humana Inc. and Otis Elevator (United Technologies Research Center). He has been publishing and presenting for over a decade and has become an internationally recognized speaker on a wide range of design and technology topics. Recent lecturing venues have included the Google Tech Talks series, the d.school at Stanford University, the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference (ETech), Intel’s Future Technologies Research Summit, PICNIC08, SIGCHI, IDSA/ICSID, DEFCON and the Designing User Experience (DUX).
Matt is a member of the part-time faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he has taught studio courses since 1999 on wide-ranging topics such as emergency medicine, physical computing and service design. He is also an Adjunct Professor at UmeΠInstitute of Design (UID Sweden) where he leads core interaction design modules and contributes to ongoing curriculum development. He is a member of the Visiting Faculty at the Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design (CIID, Denmark). Matt is also a visiting speaker at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO, Norway), and at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA).
Christian Crumlish is the curator of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, a design evangelist with the Yahoo! Developer Network, and a member of Yahoo!’s design council. He is also co-chair of the monthly BayCHI program, a member of the Open Web Foundation, and a director of the Information Architecture Institute.
Liz Danzico is equal parts designer, educator, and editor. She has organized information across a variety of industries, including retail, publishing, media and entertainment, nonprofit, and financial services. She co-founded (with Steven Heller) and is Chair of the MFA in Interaction Design Program at the School of Visual Arts. She is an independent consultant in New York and user experience consultant for Happy Cog, on the editorial board for Rosenfeld Media, and columnist for Interactions Magazine.
Liz has taught design at the New School University, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Columbia University. She’s been editor-in-chief for A Brief Message, editor-in-chief for Boxes and Arrows, and an advisory board member of the Information Architecture Institute. In the past, Liz directed experience strategy for AIGA, where she was responsible for the national web presence and all online and New Riders publications. Before that, she directed the information architecture teams at Barnes & Noble.com and Razorfish New York.
Will Evans is founder and Principal User Experience Architect for Semantic Foundry with 14 years industry experience in information architecture and user experience design. His experiences includes directing user experience design and information architecture for AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for web 2.0 social networking site Gather.com; and UX Architect responsible for information architecture and interaction design for Kayak.com. Before Kayak, he was the senior information architect at IBM working on their enterprise learning management platform. Before IBM, he worked at Curl – a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Most recently Will has lead design projects for Pillsbury, General Mills, HiveFire and CrowdSprout.
A distinguished speaker, Will provides lectures and seminars on such topics as user experience, strategic design, social interaction design, and findability. Will’s work has been featured in numerous publications including Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, MSNBC and the Wall Street Journal.
With more than 25 years of experience in crafting compelling interfaces, Shelley Evenson is adept at helping organizations develop an in-depth understanding of customer needs, building experience strategies that respond to those needs, and implementing strategies across platforms and channels. She has been recognized as an industry pioneer, and helped set what became the industry standard for ‘design language’ and interface guideline development across a range of products.
Currently a Principal User Experience Designer for Microsoft Startup Labs, an incubation team focused on social productivity and interaction, Shelley was most recently an Associate Professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Shelley taught courses in designing conceptual models, interaction, and service design, and collaborated with colleagues from the Tepper School of Business and the Human Computer Interaction Institute to integrate business, technology, and design in designing for service. At Carnegie Mellon Shelley’s projects were sponsored by GM, Intel, Microsoft, and Motorola.
Christopher Fahey is a founding partner and user experience director at Behavior, an award-winning New York web design consultancy focused on building compelling and elegant user experiences for business and culture.
At Behavior, Chris has led the IA and UXD strategies for clients and projects in many industries, including BusinessWeek, The National Geographic Channel, UNICEF, HBO, The Smithsonian Institution, McGraw-Hill, JPMorgan Chase, XM Satellite Radio, AARP, the AIGA, and The Onion. In his 14+ years as a professional interaction designer and manager, Chris’s projects have covered everything from business- critical web applications to sci-fi adventure games and artificial intelligence chatbots.
Chris is an active speaker on user experience design, with recent events including SXSW, An Event Apart, the ASIS&T IA Summit, Euro IA, The Society for Technical Communications Summit, and the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo NYC.
He teaches at the School of Visual Arts’ new interaction design MFA program in 2009, and has also taught at FIT, Brooklyn College, and the City College of New York. His internet artwork has been featured in the Whitney and the New Museum. Chris also blogs about design, technology, culture, and whatever else he’s interested in at http://www.graphpaper.com.
Ben is an interaction designer with an interest in exploring the implications of the increasing influence of design and technology on our lives. He currently works at IDEO in the Bay Area, having previously spent time at Twitter. Before moving to California, Ben worked in London at Samsung’s European design studio, pioneering service design and innovation consultancy live|work, and digital full service agency Oyster Partners (now LBi) during the early years of the web.
Ben has produced work for clients including Orange, the BBC, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Vodafone, Samsung, Twitter, T-Mobile, the V&A Museum, the Rothschild Foundation, Boots, the Design Council, Qwest, BAA, the US Government, and Macmillan Cancer Research. He has written for the ACM’s “Interactions” magazine, has been a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Arts, the UC Berkeley iSchool and NYU’s ITP, and has spoken at Design Engaged and SXSW Interactive.
He holds a BA in Contemporary Literature and an MA from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London, where he explored the development of technology within the context of the academic study and experience of material culture. Projects that Ben has worked on have been nominated for a BAFTA and won a Spark Award, among others.
Dave Gray is the founder and chairman of XPLANE, an information design consultancy serving Fortune 100, NGO and government clients around the world. An artist, journalist and information designer, he is passionate about applied creativity. More information is available at http:/davegrayinfo.com.
Raphael Grignani established Nokia Design studio in San Francisco in 2008 where he leads a multidisciplinary design team that works across the Nokia organization to clarify and translate business opportunities through design.
His experience at Nokia ranges from product and service design to exploratory human behavioral field research. He also worked on long-term design concepts such as the Homegrown project where we looked at how environmental and social issues may change mobile design in the coming years. Before joining Nokia in Helsinki in 2002, Raphael provided digital design leadership through concepting and co-development for clients that include Razorfish, Adcore, Benefon, WMG, and Asema.
Raphael earned a Master of Arts from the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland in Product and Strategic Design. He is an active participant in design community often involved in design thinking and projects in the field of mobile digital design. Raphael frequently speaks on the role of design in environmental and social issues; most recently at Lift Korea, UPA international conference, AIGA Design Conference, and Kyoorius DesignYatra. He currently lives and works from San Francisco, USA.
Jamin Hegeman is a senior designer at Nokia Design in San Francisco, where he works across the Nokia organization to define new services, experiences, and business opportunities. His 13 years of experience includes being a journalist, editor, web developer, interaction designer, teacher, and business owner. He has a masters in design with a focus on interaction design from Carnegie Mellon University, and a degree in poetry writing from the University of Pittsburgh. Jamin has been on the Service Design Network planning board for the 2008 and 2009 conferences. He also directed CMU’s Emergence service design conference in 2007.
Dan Hill is a designer and urbanist. He’s been working at the forefront of interaction design since the early ‘90s and is responsible for shaping many innovative, popular and critically acclaimed products and services. He is currently a senior consultant at Arup in Sydney.
As Head of Interactive Technology & Design at the BBC in London, he led design across their award-winning websites as well as conducting significant strategic work, re-thinking the organisation for the on-demand age. He co-founded the global media product Monocle, and is one of the organisers of the acclaimed architecture and urbanism event Postopolis!, running in New York and Los Angeles. He also writes City of Sound, generally thought of as one of the leading architecture and urbanism websites.
For Arup, Dan is exploring the possibilities of urban informatics from a creative, design-led perspective, re-thinking how real-time information networks change streets and cities, neighbourhoods and organisations, mobility and work, play and public space. He works on major urban development projects worldwide.
Laurie Holcombe is a web developer with over 10 years of experience driving innovative, successful solutions for clients. Laurie resides in Athens, GA, where she has served as Lead Developer at The Adsmith, a small award-winning advertising and design agency, for six years running. In this role, she evolved the product development process – teaching and walking clients through each benchmark, research insight, IA and development strategies, through product launch and life cycle.
She loves thinking about problem solving, developing great markup and best practices for development teams. Laurie draws upon both her fine arts and technical backgrounds to create a unique perspective; visually compelling, technically sound design from the inside out. Laurie’s formal education includes a BFA in Telecommunications from the University of Georgia, graduating cum laude, and a New Media Interdisciplinary Certificate (NMIC) from UGA’s New Media Institute, along with extensive training in photography. Laurie’s “free time” is spent producing head-nodding podcasts and indulging her photographic pursuits. Her photography has been published in several books; The Quiet Life Vol. 2, The University of Georgia’s G Book. Laurie plans
to have her second solo photography show later this year.
Barbara Holmes has been working in interface design and content development since 1989, when she participated as a lead instructional designer in the development of a series of computer-based, laserdisc (who remembers those?) training courses for Nissan Motors. Since then, she’s worked as a freelancer, on staff, and at agencies, designing a wide range of digital training and simulations for the military, medical, oil extraction, automotive, financial, high tech, higher education and public non-profit sectors. During the last nine years she’s transitioned her focus from pure instructional design to information architect/interaction designer, and now works in the agency/vendor world. Currently a Senior Information Architect at ISITE Design in Portland, Oregon, she unites her passions for user-centered design and a deep love of meaningful content to teach, preach and practice usability, plus design interfaces for software applications, social networking, B2C and B2B websites. She is a senior member of the Society for Technical Communicators and also a member of ASTD, CHIFOO, and one of the planning board members of IxDA Portland. A lifelong learner, Barbara has completed training in usability techniques, project management, instructional design and interaction design techniques from industry conferences. She received an undergraduate degree from University of California, Berkeley and a graduate degree from San Diego State University.
Tom Igoe is an Associate Arts Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Coming from a background in theatre lighting design, he teaches courses and workshops in physical computing and networking, exploring ways to allow digital technologies to sense and respond to a wider range of human physical expression. Current research focuses on ecologically sustainable practices in technology development and how open hardware development can contribute to that.
Igoe has written two books on physical computing: “Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers,”co-authored with Dan O’Sullivan, and “Making Things Talk” Both have been adopted by digital art and design programs around the world. He is a regular contributor to MAKE magazine on the subject as well. He is also a member of the core development team of Arduino, an open source microcontroller environment built for non-technicians. He has consulted for The American Museum of the Moving Image, EAR Studio, Diller + Scofidio Architects, Eos Orchestra, HBO, and others. He is a collaborator on the Arduino open source microcontroller project. He is currently realizing a lifelong dream to work with monkeys as well.
Jani brings to RKS extensive experience in research and strategy. He has a Masters in Industrial Design from North Carolina State University and two undergraduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Mumbai. He has an eclectic mix of experience from working at Dell, Ignition, Larsen & Toubro, NCSU College of Management, SymbientPD, and Gamil. Jani passionately leverages his multifaceted background in strategy, design, technology and culture to create compelling strategic solutions for user experience and brand enhancement.
Jon Kolko is an Associate Creative Director at frog design. He has extensive experience in the professional world of interaction design, working around complicated technological constraints in order to best solve the problems of Fortune 500 clients. His work has extended into the domains of consumer electronics, mobility, supply chain management, demand planning, and customer-relationship management, and he has worked with clients such as AT&T, HP, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Ford, IBM, Palm and other leaders of the Global 2000. The underlying theme of these problems and projects was the creation of a solution that was useful, usable, and desirable. He is the author of the text Thoughts on Interaction Design published by Morgan Kaufmann, and he sits on the Board of Directors for the IxDA.
Mike Kruzeniski is a UX Creative Director for the Entertainment Experience Group at Microsoft, in Seattle. Before joining Microsoft, Mike was a Designer on Nokia Design’s Insight & Innovation team in Los Angeles, where he worked on projects such as the Nokia 2010 View of the Future, and the concept design for the Nokia 8800 Arte. He has a Master’s of Interaction Design from the Umea Institute of Design in Sweden, and a Bachelor of Industrial Design from the Emily Carr Institute of Design in Vancouver, BC.
Livia Labate is a user experience designer practicing in Philadelphia at Comcast Interactive Media. She also currenty on the IA Institute Board of Directors and co-chairing the 2010 and 2011 IA Summits. In other words, she loves the UX world and enjoys giving back to the community.
Alexis Lloyd is a Creative Technologist for the Research and Development group at The New York Times Company. She is responsible for researching technology trends and prototyping future interfaces for content consumption across multiple platforms and devices.
In addition to her work at the Times, Ms. Lloyd has over 12 years experience as a multimedia and interaction designer, and has designed award-winning projects for clients such as FOX, Columbia University, American Express, The New York Historical Society, PBS, and others. In addition, her new media art and design work has been shown internationally, in such venues as SIGGRAPH, the Chelsea Art Museum, Artgadgets (Netherlands), MAD Emergent Arts Center (Netherlands), the Melvin Art Gallery, and Symphony Space. Ms. Lloyd holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons The New School for Design.
Erin Malone, a Principal with Tangible UX, has over 20 years of experience leading design teams and developing social experiences for companies like Yahoo!, AOL, AltaVista, Intuit and others. She is the founder of the Yahoo! Pattern Library and a founding member of the IA Institute.
Professor of Design at the Politecnico di Milano, Honorary Doctor at The New School of New York (2006) and at the Goldsmiths College of London (2008) and honorary professor at the Glasgow School of Art (2009).
Presently, his main interests are towards design for social innovation and, in particular, towards the promotion of DESIS, an international network on Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (http://www.desis-network.org). Recent publications: Collaborative services. Social innovation and design for sustainability (Polidesign. Milano, 2008) and Service Design in the Age of Networks and Sustainability (in: Miettinen, S., Koivisto, M., ed., Designing Services, University of Arts and Design, Helsinki, 2009).
Peter Morville is a writer, speaker, and consultant. His bestselling books include Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Ambient Findability. He advises such clients as AT&T, Harvard, IBM, the Library of Congress, Microsoft, the National Cancer Institute, Vodafone, and the Weather Channel. His work on experience design and the future of search has been covered by Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal. Peter’s latest book, Search Patterns, was published in 2010. He blogs at findability.org.
Ko Nakatsu is a senior design researcher and strategist at RKS Design. He works on product and service strategies for international clients. His excitement for design led him to work as an interaction and search designer at McMaster-Carr, a site that ranked third (behind Amazon and Barnes and Noble) in trust and credibility by Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab. Ko continued his design passion in the Advanced Planning and Strategy department at Nissan North America where he developed future 2013 to 2023 human transportation concepts for global production and cultural inspiration. He received a BFA in industrial design from Carnegie Mellon University.
Rob Nero is currently working on his Master’s thesis at the Interaction Design Masters program at Malmö University, in Malmö, Sweden. Before deciding to move to Sweden, he designed enterprise web applications for large and Fortune 500 companies for 10 years. Rob’s design projects while attending the Masters program include a music remix web site that was used in a national campaign for refugees, a Bluetooth-enabled music distribution box for an inner-city hip-hop club, and multiple physical prototyping projects with the Arduino platform.
After graduation in 2010, Rob is seeking employment opportunities in the physical and tangible interface areas. He hopes to continue his work in rapid physical prototyping, electronics, and people interaction in every adventure and future employment.
Nicolas Nova is both researcher at Liftlab – with a specific interest in user experience and foresight in particular with regards to future technologies/practices and their implications – and the editorial manager of the Lift conferences (Switzerland, South Korea, France). He has a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the Swiss Institute of Technology (EPFL, Lausanne) where he also worked as a research scientist at the Media and Design Lab.
He runs field studies that aim at informing design projects for various companies and institutions in domains such as mobile/urban/location-based applications, tangible and gestural interactions, social computing, gaming and networked objects.
He blogs at Pasta and Vinegar, about future technologies/practices and their implications. He speaks and lectures widely on these topics at such institutions and conferences as Mediamatic (Amsterdam), the Institute for the Future (Palo Alto), Experientia (Torino), the Annenberg Center for Communication (Los Angeles), Ubicomp, NordicCHI to name just a few. He teaches design research at ENSCI (Paris) and HEAD (Geneva).
Lara Penin, PhD is a full-time Professor of Transdisciplinary Design at the School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design, where she teaches at the Design and Management and Integrated Design programs. Her work focuses on Design for Sustainability, Design for Sustainable Social Innovation and Service Design. At Parsons, she coordinates the Area of Study of Service Design and is co-founder and member of the Research Lab Design and Social Innovation for Sustainability (DESIS Lab).
Lara has a successful record of research, education and development projects on an international scale. In her previous position as a research consultant at Milan Polytechnic University, she has managed the project “Creative Communities for Sustainable Lifestyles”, funded by the United Nations’ Task Force on Sustainable Lifestyles, dedicated to research and modeling sustainable ways of living in Brazil, India and China through design methods and tools. She has successfully launched and managed the project LENS, the Learning Network on Sustainability, focused on education for Design for Sustainability and Product-Service Systems, financed by the European Commission, coordinated by Milan Polytechnic University in partnership with six universities in Europe and Asia.
She holds a PhD in Industrial Design and Multimedia Communication from Milan Polytechnic University, Italy and a BA in Architecture and Urban Planning from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She has lectured in Europe, China, India and Brazil and has published several papers and articles.
Steve Portigal is the principal of Portigal Consulting, a bite-sized firm that helps clients to discover and act on new insights about themselves and their customers. Steve regularly speaks at design and marketing events and writes regularly for interactions, Core77 and the Portigal Consulting blog, All This ChittahChattah. Steve is an avid photographer who has a Museum of Foreign Grocery Products in his home.
Deepa Prahalad is co-author of Predictable Magic. She holds a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from the University of Michigan as well as an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Passionate about emerging markets and innovation, her career has included roles as a commodities trader (based in Asia) and as a management consultant. She also authored the first business plan and raised capital for Safe-Med, now an analytic engine used by Google Health.
Dan Saffer is a founder and principal at the design consultancy Kicker Studio. Dan has designed devices, software, websites, and services since 1995, and these products are currently used by millions every day. An acclaimed speaker and author, his two books are Designing for Interaction, Second Edition (New Riders) and Designing Gestural Interfaces (O’Reilly). Dan is an internationally-recognized thought leader on design who has spoken at conferences and taught workshops on interaction design all over the world. He has a Masters of Design in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University, and his design innovations have received several patents.
Dennis Schleicher uses his background in business and industrial anthropology to design interactive products to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives. In addition to being a past chair of the largest Information Architecture Summit, he continues to be a leading force in the design community and is actively involved with the Information Architecture Institute, the ASIST Special Interest Group of Information Architecture, Overlap, and the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Dennis is Director, User Experience Architecture at Sears Holdings in Chicago. He has worked with American Public University Systems, Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, United States Air Force, Microsoft, Comcast, Dominos, White Castle, Bosch, and Numara. His corporate pedigree includes work at Argus Associates, the company that wrote the book on Information Architecture, and the Ford account at JWT, the largest account at the largest advertising company in the US.
Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the ground-breaking MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, CA. He is one of the pioneers in Experience Design, Interaction Design and Information Design. He speaks and teaches internationally and has written extensively on design and business issues, including, Experience Design 1 and maintains a website with resources on Experience Design at www.nathan.com/ed. He’s a serial entrepreneur, works in several media, and consults strategically for companies to build better, more meaningful experiences for their customers. His latest book, Making Meaning, co-written with two members of Cheskin, a Silicon Valley-based strategy consultancy, explores how companies can specifically create products and services to evoke meaning in their audiences and customers.
My unique combination of skills allows me to move fluidly between design research and interaction design. While at lextant, I have worked on diverse projects including health care systems, retail environments, medical devices, financial service design, and enterprise management applications.
I am responsible for both account and project management, however my true passion is in designing solutions that resonate with consumers. I’ve been told that I have an innate ability to immerse myself in the consumer’s domain. My sensitivity to both implicit and explicit communications between people, artifacts, and context of use allows me to excel in identifying patterns, breakdowns, and opportunities.
On the client level, my goal is to align interdisciplinary teams around a common goal by facilitating communication across the disciplines of marketing, business, design, and engineering. I have established productive partnerships with companies such as Cardinal Health, CheckFree, Cordis, Dell, Diebold, Hewlett-Packard, Hollister, Hunter, Moen, Nationwide Insurance, and GE Healthcare.
Kel Smith is a nationally recognized authority on Web accessibility, with a list of publications that have been cited by the Pentagon Library, Kent State’s Knowledge Management Program, and the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. In February 2008 he founded Anikto (ah-NEEK-toh) as a consultancy to explore and support the creation of barrier-free digital experiences spanning multiple disciplines, markets and contexts. He presented on the topic of virtual world applications at the CSUN 2009 Technology Conference for Persons with Disabilities and at the TechShare 2009 conference in London, UK. Kel is a member of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and the Information Architecture Institute (IAI), and he currently serves as Vice Chair of the Philadelphia chapter of ACM/SIG-CHI for computer-human interaction. He earned his BFA in photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art and studied cognitive science as part of MS program at Philadelphia University.
Donna Spencer is a freelance information architect, interaction designer, world-renowned speaker and workshop leader, and author of a wildly popular book about card sorting. (Seriously, it’s bigger than “The Da Vinci Code” in Slovenia.) She’s Australian so she talks funny and laughs a lot, both of which should make Visual Thinker’s Pictionary a big hit.
Sara Summers is a User Experience Evangelist for Microsoft based out of Austin, TX. Sara is currently coauthoring a book for experience designers, entitled Dynamic Prototyping, expected to be on bookshelves early 2010. She has a personal mantra of design democracy – happy, healthy designers and developers working and playing together to create beautiful, inspirational products.
Sara speaks often and loves to talk about big ideas, changing everything, breaking your toys, throwing away your designs and capturing new ideas. In search for the best design process recipes she has worked for several renowned agencies; Frog Design, Young Rubicam, Projekt202, and with good people like; AMD, HP, Logitech, Microsoft, Motorola, NFL and Sony. For over 14 years, she has been deeply involved in the production and development of product strategy, vision and design, guiding and influencing design process with each team and project.
Sara reads everything she can get her hands on and prides herself in being an armchair social and cognitive scientist and researcher. Academically, she is trained as a technologist and visual designer, with a BS in Computer Graphics Technology, from Purdue University.
Martin Tomitsch is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Sydney. He teaches Interaction Design (undergrad) and Human-Computer Interaction (postgrad). In his free time (aka ‘research’) he likes to think about interactions beyond the screen. This quest has also inspired his PhD on the use of interaction design methodologies for designing smart environments, which he completed in 2008. Before joining the University of Sydney he taught User Interface Design and Usability Engineering at the Vienna University of Technology and worked as usability consultant at a Vienna-based R&D spin-off.
Guillermo Torres is part of Adobe’s XD team where as a Sr. UX Designer he works on crafting the experience for products like Flash Catalyst. Prior to joining Adobe, he navigated between interaction design and development at AKQA and Method. Always bringing a mix of both left and right brain to everything he does. In his 10 years of in the industry he has created engaging, award winning interactive experiences for global brands such as Nike, Microsoft, Visa and Target.
Jeanne Turner is the Leader of IxDA Portland and an Information Architect at ISITE Design. At ISITE, Jeanne conducts user research to understand the needs and goals of people in a variety of target audiences — such as academic researchers trying to peruse colleagues’ working papers and restaurateurs eager to source food from local farmers. She applies that understanding to the design of thoughtful and appropriate interactive experiences. Outside of ISITE, Jeanne plans design jam sessions, coordinates lectures and workshops, and serves the IxD community. She has a degree in Computer Science with a focus on human-computer interaction from the University of Hawaii.
Russ Unger is the Director of Experience Planning for Draftfcb, the largest advertising/marketing agency in the Midwest. Russ has been working on websites since 1993 – when there was only Notepad to code with and Mosaic was the only browser around. That was when he found his interest in User Experience Design and Information Architecture began to flourish.
Since then, he has worked with a number of major brands, including Gatorade, Propel, Quaker and Celebrity Cruise Lines, as well as on large scale Intranet and Extranet applications for such companies as Volkswagen Credit, Audi Financial Services, Information Resources, Inc. and Marsh. He has been involved in the Information Architecture for large-scale public-facing sites for such companies as Metromix, Oprah.com, United Airlines and Hewlett-Packard. He has also worked off-line, creating unique biometric (fingerprint reader) applications and has worked as the Design Lead for Motorola’s Connectivity domain where he was responsible for creating user interfaces for mobile applications in Motorola’s Consumer Experience Design group. Russ worked closely with such major carriers as T-Mobile, Cingular/AT&T and Vodafone to design features for Bluetooth, WiFi and over-the-air updates. He has also taught courses in Web and Interactive/Flash Design.
In his spare time, he is an author and editor for Boxes and Arrows, a well-known online Information Architecture magazine. In addition to being a mentor for the Information Architecture Institute, Russ also serves on the 2200+ member organization’s Board of Directors as the Director of Events and Marketing. As if that is not enough, he tries to actively blog on topics in User Experience Design at UserGlue UserBlog.
Russ is co-author of the book A Project Guide to User Experience Design with Carolyn Chandler for Peachpit Press (Voices That Matter).
Greg Vassallo is a Senior Associate in the User Experience Design group at Moment, an independent interaction design firm in New York. Greg holds a Bachelor’s degree in photography from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, and a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University.
Greg’s work focuses on generative research, design strategy, information architecture, and interaction design for web-based and mobile applications. He’s passionate about user experience design and how it can change the world. He also has a slightly unhealthy fetish for wireframes and design documentation.
Kate Walser became a user experience designer in 1997. Since then, she’s talked with and observed audiences from lower-literacy, rural patients to business professionals and high-wealth consumers to understand what their users want and design Web sites and software that make sense to users and engage them. She’s worked with the US Departments of Health & Human Services, Justice, Defense, and Veterans Affairs; US Postal Service; IRS; Small Business Administration; and Commonwealth of Virginia; as well as companies including AXA/Equitable, T. Rowe Price, and PEPCO. Her work has received awards, including eHealthcare and Government Trailblazer awards. She’s presented at conferences including Social Media for Government, The New New Internet Conference, Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) International, and The Internet Security Conference.
Kate established and led Usability Centers of Excellence at SRA International and American Management Systems, before starting a consulting division focused on customer experiences, CX Insights, at Tritus Technologies. She serves on several advisory boards, including the DC chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA-DC) and the Section 508 refresh federal advisory committee.
Dan Willis has been building Web products and creating “no-duh” deliverables for something like a hundred years and although he usually hides behind his alter ego UX Crank, he has agreed not to wear a mask for the duration of this session. At least not on his face.
Denise Wilton is the Creative Director of award winning online print company moo.com.
A varied role, she is responsible for the creation of the brand, from the visual look and feel both on and offline, to the tone of voice in written, customer-facing communication. She is also the community manager – and with her third hand, makes a mean cup of tea.
Working as a designer for over 15 years, she has held various senior design roles in traditional and online media.
Denise is also co-founder of the large online creative community, b3ta.com, which, she warns, is not for the faint-hearted.
You will find Indi working on design projects and running mental model research for clients, teaching, writing, and craving chocolate in Marin County, where she unfortunately does not have a hot tub. She thinks she got turned on to design research by reading C.J. Cherryh’s Cyteen series while she was a software engineer back in the 80’s. She’s a co-founder of Adaptive Path and writes a blog at Rosenfeld Media. If anything can be said about her workshops, she will honestly make you feel more comfortable chatting to strangers at cocktail parties.
Jeremy Yuille is an interaction designer, digital media artist and academic with a background in digital art, music, performance and architecture. He has a Bachelor of Design Studies from the Architecture department of the University of Queensland and a Masters of Design from SIAL at RMIT University. Jeremy is a co-founder of the Media and Communication Design Studio at RMIT, where he undertakes collaborative research with the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID), supervises postgraduate students, and holds interaction design studios. He is also a certified scrum-master, and a director of the Interaction Design Association.
As teachers in design programs, both Jeremy and Martin are very experienced with facilitating professional and student input in a discussion format. They can also tap-dance when required.
Todd Zaki Warfel, founder and principal designer at Messagefirst, has been designing products and services for over 15 years. Todd’s clients have included AT&T Wireless, Bankrate, Citibank, and Comcast, Numara and NYU just to name a few.
An internationally recognized thought leader on research and design, and author of the prototyping course for the Web Standards Project Education Task Force, he has spoken at conferences and taught workshops around the globe.
His new book, Prototyping: a practitioner’s guide, discusses how prototypes are more than just a design tool and shows you how to use prototyping to create a common language, market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team.
Speakers
The heart of every conference are the speakers, the people who offer us new perspectives, teach us new methods, and inspire us to think big. We’re proud to present these Interaction10 Speakers to you.
Gretchen Anderson, LUNAR
As LUNAR’s Director of User Interface Design, Gretchen Anderson designs products that are as pleasurable to use as they are powerful in expression. She seeks out those design challenges that ultimately make a positive impact on people’s daily lives and environment. With a design philosophy rooted in the belief that a user interface should be seamless and invisible, she has designed a wide variety of products and experiences: from medical devices to casino entertainment to business productivity tools. Gretchen graduated with honors from Harvard University. Her experience spans 15 years, and prior to joining LUNAR, she worked for several Bay Area design consultancies. Her clients include: Johnson & Johnson, TurboChef, Microsoft, Virgin Records and HP. She also enjoys teaching design and research methodologies to fellow designers and business people alike.
The Importance of Facial Features
Paola Antonelli
Keynote Speaker
Paola Antonelli is senior curator of architecture and design at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she has worked since 1994. Before MoMA, she curated design and architecture exhibitions in many countries and worked as contributing editor for Domus magazine and design editor of Abitare. She has lectured on design and architecture worldwide and has published numerous articles in publications ranging from Seed and Nest to The Harvard Design Review. Antonelli is author of a number of books, including Workspheres (2001), Objects of Design from the Modern Museum of Art (2003), Humble Masterpieces (2005), and Design and the Elastic Mind (2008).
Talk to Me
Timo Arnall
Timo Arnall is a designer working with interactive products and media. Timo leads an international research project on mobile technology, collaborates on interaction design work and lectures in design, media and technology.
Timo’s work spans design, media and technology; interested in the ways in which products are used in everyday life, the emergent uses of new technologies and the design of products and services in local contexts and situations.
Timo’s history of design work has included projects on the web, location-based and mobile services, film and interactive television production, art direction, motion graphics, installations and exhibitions.
Designing for the Web in the World
Chris Avore, Erova Studios LLC
Chris Avore is an interaction designer in the Washington DC area, specializing in usable interface design and information architecture.
After years of working independently, he grew tired of asking his bulldog for persona advice and began pestering other user experience designers for feedback, and thus UX Show & Tell was, well, you get the idea.
Activity: UX Show & Tell
Liz Bacon, Devise
Elizabeth Bacon discovered her calling with Interaction Design in the late ‘90s when she became a consultant at Cooper. There, she led projects in various domains, supervised design teams and also taught Cooper U. Following Cooper, Liz spent five years leading IxD efforts at St. Jude Medical, a Fortune 100 medical device company. In 2007, Liz co-founded Devise, a digital product design and development consultancy based in Portland, Oregon. She is passionate about the power of IxD to better the world, and has served on the IxDA Board of Directors for the past several years. In her spare time Liz loves autocross racing and writing poetry. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English and French Literature from Stanford University and a Master’s degree in Industrial Arts from San Francisco State University.
Scenarios for Design
Richard Banks, Microsoft Research
Richard Banks is a senior interaction designer for Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. He’s part of a team that spends most of its time looking at family life, trying to understand the complexities of home, in order to figure out how the digital should fit in appropriately. Richard joined Microsoft (quite a while ago) after graduating from the Royal College of Art in London. Since then he’s worked as a design manager in Seattle on Microsoft’s Office, Windows and MSN products before moving home and into research.
The 40 Year Old Tweet
Massimo Banzi, Arduino Project & tinker.it
Massimo Banzi is the co-founder of the Arduino project and CTO of tinker.it. He has worked for clients such as: Prada, Artemide, Persol, Whirlpool, V&A Museum and Adidas.
He spent 4 years at the Interaction Design Institue Ivrea as Associate Professor. Massimo has taught workshops and has been a guest speaker at institutions like: Architectural Association – London, Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel, Hochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd, FH Potsdam, Domus Academy, Medialab Madrid, Escola Superior de Disseny Barcelona, ARS Electronica Linz, Mediamatic Amsterdam, Doors of Perception Amsterdam.
Before joining IDII he was CTO for the Seat Ventures incubator. He spent many years working as a software architect,both in Milan and London, on projects for clients like Italia Online, Sapient, Labour Party, BT, MCI WorldCom, SmithKlineBeecham, Storagetek, BSkyB and boo.com.
Tangible Interface prototyping with the Tinker Toolkit
Steve Baty, Meld
Steve Baty is the founder of UX Book Club and one of the coordinators for the Sydney UX Book Club group. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Interaction Design Association; is a contributing editor for Johnny Holland; editor of Boxes & Arrows; contributor to UXmatters; and organizer of the UX Australia conference. Steve is a practitioner with over a decade of experience and a passion for solving problems through design. He likes to go fishing, but doesn’t get to very often.
Discussion: UX Book Club – What is Interaction Design?
Fred Beecher
Fred Beecher is a Senior User Experience Consultant at Evantage Consulting in Minneapolis. Fred has been working in the user experience design industry for 11 year, doing research, information architecture, interaction design, and usability evaluation for a diverse array of clients like Medtronic, UnitedHealthcare, 3M, RBC Dain Rauscher, General Mills, Thomson Reuters, and the National Marrow Donor Program.
A recognized expert in rapid prototyping, Fred speaks frequently on the topic at national professional conferences and local user experience group meetings. In 2007, Fred developed the official training program for the Axure RP Pro rapid prototyping tool at the request of the makers. He has since trained additional consultants to give the courses and currently leads a broader Axure training program for Evantage.
Fred and the rest of the Evantage user experience consultants blog on all things UX at userexperience.evantageconsulting.com.
The Right Way to Wireframe
Solomon Bisker, Carnegie Mellon/School of Architecture
Solomon Bisker is a student at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), where he is pursuing a Masters of Tangible of Interaction Design focusing on design for the built environment. Before that, he worked as an interaction designer at Cambridge Systematics, consulting with federal and state transportation agencies to explore how their processes and public interactions could be improved by technology. Before THAT, he conducted research into mobile barcode interaction design in crowds and public spaces with MIT’s Mobile Experience Lab, part of the MIT Design Lab. He has a BS and M.Eng in Computer Science from MIT.
Citizen Volunteerism and Urban Interaction Design
Nate Bolt, Bolt | Peters
Nate Bolt serves as El Presidente of Bolt | Peters where he is fascinated by the role of research and design in our lives. He has overseen hundreds of user experience projects for Sony, Oracle, Volkswagen, Greenpeace, and others. He is co-author of the Rosenfeld book, Remote Research, and created the world’s first moderated remote testing software in 2003, Ethnio, which is now being used around the world to recruit hundreds of thousands of live participants for research.
Nate gives talks about research and design in both commercial and academic settings, including a recent keynote for the Urban Libraries Council. Last century, he worked with faculty at the University of California, San Diego, to create a degree titled “Digital Technology and Society,” which focused on the social impact of technology. He also completed a year of communications studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he failed every class, and was jailed briefly for playing drums in public without a license.
Remote Design Research
MJ Broadbent
MJ (Mary Jane) Broadbent has been designing elegant solutions to complex information problems for over 20 years. With a traditional graphic design education, MJ began interaction design work in 1996 with Silicon Alley pioneer Tom Nicholson. Throughout her career, she has improved communications for clients such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bookspan (now DirectGroup Bertelsmann), Empire BlueCrossBlueShield, H&R Block, The McGraw-Hill Companies (including Standard & Poor’s), Pfizer, Sony Electronics, The United Nations, and Xerox. In her current role as a lead experience designer at Liquidnet, the global institutional equity marketplace, MJ stays busy envisioning streamlined enterprise service systems. She is an active member of numerous design-related organizations and communities; however, IxDA tops the list.
MJ co-authored and taught the seminal online course “Information Design” at Sessions.edu, and has guest-lectured on information architecture at Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education, New York University’s ITP, and the School of Visual Arts. MJ has been passionate about encouraging creative expression ever since reading “The Little Engine That Could” at age 6.
Visual Skills for the “I Can’t Draw” Crowd
Federico Casalegno
Federico Casalegno, Ph.D., is the Director of the MIT Mobile Experience Lab and Associate Director of the MIT Design Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 2006, he is the director of the Green Home Alliance between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy.
A social scientist with an interest in the impact of networked digital technologies in human behavior and society, Casalegno both teaches and leads research at MIT, especially focusing on the area of rethinking and designing interactive media to foster connections between people, information and physical places using cutting-edge information technology.
Discussion: DESIS-USA: Demands and Initiatives on Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability in the U.S.
Cindy Chastain
Cindy has been exploring ways to engage an audience through storytelling, teaching, writing and design for over twelve years. Just recently she took on the role of Creative Director, Experience Architecture at Rapp, a global, full-service agency based in NYC. She’s led projects for clients ranging from BBC Worldwide to Showtime, Fuse, Madison Square Garden, Coca-Cola and Unilever.
Cindy earned an MFA in screenwriting from Columbia University in New York and a BS in Radio, TV, Film from Northwestern University. In addition to moonlighting as a filmmaker and screenwriter, she is in the process of researching a book that explores how the elements of story can be used as a framework for design. She also coordinates UX Bookclub NYC.
Thinking Like a Storyteller
Kevin Cheng, Twitter
Kevin Cheng splits his crayon time between many endeavors. He is a product manager at Twitter, the co-founder and artist for OK/ Cancel, a webcomic on user experience, and the author of the upcoming book, See What I Mean: How to Communicate Ideas with Comics. Most recently, he is also co-produced an iPhone augmented reality ghost hunting game. Kevin blogs at kevnull.com and has been known to Twitter as @k.
Augmented Reality: Is It Real? Should We Care?
Allan Chochinov, Core77
Allan Chochinov is a partner of Core77, a New York-based design network serving a global community of designers and design enthusiasts. He is the editor-in-chief of Core77.com, the widely read design website, Coroflot.com design job and portfolio site, and DesignDirectory.com design firm database. He has been named on numerous design and utility patents, and has received awards from I.D. Magazine, Communication Arts, The Art Directors Club and The One Club. He teaches in the graduate departments of Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Girls and Women: Object Lessons in the Primacy of Interaction
Maria Cordell, Macquarium
Maria Cordell is Principal User Experience Architect at Macquarium in Atlanta. In a career that dates way back, Maria has led and produced numerous successful enterprise software and Web design projects–from corporate Web sites to enterprise-class rich Internet applications and desktop apps–for companies in telecommunications, industrial wireless data transmission, retail sales, terminal server optimization, and optical physics. Maria holds an MS in Information Design and a BS in Physics, both from Georgia Tech. She’s an avid photographer, auto racer, gardener, and amateur radio operator, and the main instigator
behind IxDA Atlanta.
Interaction Design for the Fourth Dimension
Matt Cottam, Tellart
Matt Cottam has been responsible for setting strategic direction for Tellart since co-founding the company in 1999. He provides both inspiration and direction through active involvement in client projects, academic research and teaching, as well as international design and technology conferences worldwide.
With Tellart Matt has directed design and strategy projects for clients including Nokia Design, Humana Inc. and Otis Elevator (United Technologies Research Center). He has been publishing and presenting for over a decade and has become an internationally recognized speaker on a wide range of design and technology topics. Recent lecturing venues have included the Google Tech Talks series, the d.school at Stanford University, the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference (ETech), Intel’s Future Technologies Research Summit, PICNIC08, SIGCHI, IDSA/ICSID, DEFCON and the Designing User Experience (DUX).
Matt is a member of the part-time faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he has taught studio courses since 1999 on wide-ranging topics such as emergency medicine, physical computing and service design. He is also an Adjunct Professor at UmeΠInstitute of Design (UID Sweden) where he leads core interaction design modules and contributes to ongoing curriculum development. He is a member of the Visiting Faculty at the Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design (CIID, Denmark). Matt is also a visiting speaker at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO, Norway), and at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA).
Wooden Logic: In Search of Heirloom Electronics
Christian Crumlish, Yahoo!
Christian Crumlish is the curator of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, a design evangelist with the Yahoo! Developer Network, and a member of Yahoo!’s design council. He is also co-chair of the monthly BayCHI program, a member of the Open Web Foundation, and a director of the Information Architecture Institute.
Designing Social Interfaces: The Game
Liz Danzico
Liz Danzico is equal parts designer, educator, and editor. She has organized information across a variety of industries, including retail, publishing, media and entertainment, nonprofit, and financial services. She co-founded (with Steven Heller) and is Chair of the MFA in Interaction Design Program at the School of Visual Arts. She is an independent consultant in New York and user experience consultant for Happy Cog, on the editorial board for Rosenfeld Media, and columnist for Interactions Magazine.
Liz has taught design at the New School University, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Columbia University. She’s been editor-in-chief for A Brief Message, editor-in-chief for Boxes and Arrows, and an advisory board member of the Information Architecture Institute. In the past, Liz directed experience strategy for AIGA, where she was responsible for the national web presence and all online and New Riders publications. Before that, she directed the information architecture teams at Barnes & Noble.com and Razorfish New York.
Frames: Notes on Interaction and Design
Will Evans
Will Evans is founder and Principal User Experience Architect for Semantic Foundry with 14 years industry experience in information architecture and user experience design. His experiences includes directing user experience design and information architecture for AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for web 2.0 social networking site Gather.com; and UX Architect responsible for information architecture and interaction design for Kayak.com. Before Kayak, he was the senior information architect at IBM working on their enterprise learning management platform. Before IBM, he worked at Curl – a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Most recently Will has lead design projects for Pillsbury, General Mills, HiveFire and CrowdSprout.
A distinguished speaker, Will provides lectures and seminars on such topics as user experience, strategic design, social interaction design, and findability. Will’s work has been featured in numerous publications including Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, MSNBC and the Wall Street Journal.
The Right Way to Wireframe
Shelley Evenson
With more than 25 years of experience in crafting compelling interfaces, Shelley Evenson is adept at helping organizations develop an in-depth understanding of customer needs, building experience strategies that respond to those needs, and implementing strategies across platforms and channels. She has been recognized as an industry pioneer, and helped set what became the industry standard for ‘design language’ and interface guideline development across a range of products.
Currently a Principal User Experience Designer for Microsoft Startup Labs, an incubation team focused on social productivity and interaction, Shelley was most recently an Associate Professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Shelley taught courses in designing conceptual models, interaction, and service design, and collaborated with colleagues from the Tepper School of Business and the Human Computer Interaction Institute to integrate business, technology, and design in designing for service. At Carnegie Mellon Shelley’s projects were sponsored by GM, Intel, Microsoft, and Motorola.
Service as Design
Christopher Fahey, Behavior Design
Christopher Fahey is a founding partner and user experience director at Behavior, an award-winning New York web design consultancy focused on building compelling and elegant user experiences for business and culture.
At Behavior, Chris has led the IA and UXD strategies for clients and projects in many industries, including BusinessWeek, The National Geographic Channel, UNICEF, HBO, The Smithsonian Institution, McGraw-Hill, JPMorgan Chase, XM Satellite Radio, AARP, the AIGA, and The Onion. In his 14+ years as a professional interaction designer and manager, Chris’s projects have covered everything from business- critical web applications to sci-fi adventure games and artificial intelligence chatbots.
Chris is an active speaker on user experience design, with recent events including SXSW, An Event Apart, the ASIS&T IA Summit, Euro IA, The Society for Technical Communications Summit, and the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo NYC.
He teaches at the School of Visual Arts’ new interaction design MFA program in 2009, and has also taught at FIT, Brooklyn College, and the City College of New York. His internet artwork has been featured in the Whitney and the New Museum. Chris also blogs about design, technology, culture, and whatever else he’s interested in at http://www.graphpaper.com.
The Human Interface (or: Why Products are People, Too)
Ben Fullerton, IDEO
Ben is an interaction designer with an interest in exploring the implications of the increasing influence of design and technology on our lives. He currently works at IDEO in the Bay Area, having previously spent time at Twitter. Before moving to California, Ben worked in London at Samsung’s European design studio, pioneering service design and innovation consultancy live|work, and digital full service agency Oyster Partners (now LBi) during the early years of the web.
Ben has produced work for clients including Orange, the BBC, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Vodafone, Samsung, Twitter, T-Mobile, the V&A Museum, the Rothschild Foundation, Boots, the Design Council, Qwest, BAA, the US Government, and Macmillan Cancer Research. He has written for the ACM’s “Interactions” magazine, has been a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Arts, the UC Berkeley iSchool and NYU’s ITP, and has spoken at Design Engaged and SXSW Interactive.
He holds a BA in Contemporary Literature and an MA from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London, where he explored the development of technology within the context of the academic study and experience of material culture. Projects that Ben has worked on have been nominated for a BAFTA and won a Spark Award, among others.
Designing for Solitude
Dave Gray
Dave Gray is the founder and chairman of XPLANE, an information design consultancy serving Fortune 100, NGO and government clients around the world. An artist, journalist and information designer, he is passionate about applied creativity. More information is available at http:/davegrayinfo.com.
Knowledge Games: A Grammar for Creativity and Innovation
Raphael Grignani
Raphael Grignani established Nokia Design studio in San Francisco in 2008 where he leads a multidisciplinary design team that works across the Nokia organization to clarify and translate business opportunities through design.
His experience at Nokia ranges from product and service design to exploratory human behavioral field research. He also worked on long-term design concepts such as the Homegrown project where we looked at how environmental and social issues may change mobile design in the coming years. Before joining Nokia in Helsinki in 2002, Raphael provided digital design leadership through concepting and co-development for clients that include Razorfish, Adcore, Benefon, WMG, and Asema.
Raphael earned a Master of Arts from the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland in Product and Strategic Design. He is an active participant in design community often involved in design thinking and projects in the field of mobile digital design. Raphael frequently speaks on the role of design in environmental and social issues; most recently at Lift Korea, UPA international conference, AIGA Design Conference, and Kyoorius DesignYatra. He currently lives and works from San Francisco, USA.
Designing for Billions of People
Jamin Hegeman, Nokia
Jamin Hegeman is a senior designer at Nokia Design in San Francisco, where he works across the Nokia organization to define new services, experiences, and business opportunities. His 13 years of experience includes being a journalist, editor, web developer, interaction designer, teacher, and business owner. He has a masters in design with a focus on interaction design from Carnegie Mellon University, and a degree in poetry writing from the University of Pittsburgh. Jamin has been on the Service Design Network planning board for the 2008 and 2009 conferences. He also directed CMU’s Emergence service design conference in 2007.
Service Design: an Interaction Design Perspective
Dan Hill
Keynote Speaker
Dan Hill is a designer and urbanist. He’s been working at the forefront of interaction design since the early ‘90s and is responsible for shaping many innovative, popular and critically acclaimed products and services. He is currently a senior consultant at Arup in Sydney.
As Head of Interactive Technology & Design at the BBC in London, he led design across their award-winning websites as well as conducting significant strategic work, re-thinking the organisation for the on-demand age. He co-founded the global media product Monocle, and is one of the organisers of the acclaimed architecture and urbanism event Postopolis!, running in New York and Los Angeles. He also writes City of Sound, generally thought of as one of the leading architecture and urbanism websites.
For Arup, Dan is exploring the possibilities of urban informatics from a creative, design-led perspective, re-thinking how real-time information networks change streets and cities, neighbourhoods and organisations, mobility and work, play and public space. He works on major urban development projects worldwide.
New Soft City
Laurie Holcombe
Laurie Holcombe is a web developer with over 10 years of experience driving innovative, successful solutions for clients. Laurie resides in Athens, GA, where she has served as Lead Developer at The Adsmith, a small award-winning advertising and design agency, for six years running. In this role, she evolved the product development process – teaching and walking clients through each benchmark, research insight, IA and development strategies, through product launch and life cycle.
She loves thinking about problem solving, developing great markup and best practices for development teams. Laurie draws upon both her fine arts and technical backgrounds to create a unique perspective; visually compelling, technically sound design from the inside out. Laurie’s formal education includes a BFA in Telecommunications from the University of Georgia, graduating cum laude, and a New Media Interdisciplinary Certificate (NMIC) from UGA’s New Media Institute, along with extensive training in photography. Laurie’s “free time” is spent producing head-nodding podcasts and indulging her photographic pursuits. Her photography has been published in several books; The Quiet Life Vol. 2, The University of Georgia’s G Book. Laurie plans
to have her second solo photography show later this year.
Microsoft Expression: The team that plays together stays together
Barbara Holmes, iSITE
Barbara Holmes has been working in interface design and content development since 1989, when she participated as a lead instructional designer in the development of a series of computer-based, laserdisc (who remembers those?) training courses for Nissan Motors. Since then, she’s worked as a freelancer, on staff, and at agencies, designing a wide range of digital training and simulations for the military, medical, oil extraction, automotive, financial, high tech, higher education and public non-profit sectors. During the last nine years she’s transitioned her focus from pure instructional design to information architect/interaction designer, and now works in the agency/vendor world. Currently a Senior Information Architect at ISITE Design in Portland, Oregon, she unites her passions for user-centered design and a deep love of meaningful content to teach, preach and practice usability, plus design interfaces for software applications, social networking, B2C and B2B websites. She is a senior member of the Society for Technical Communicators and also a member of ASTD, CHIFOO, and one of the planning board members of IxDA Portland. A lifelong learner, Barbara has completed training in usability techniques, project management, instructional design and interaction design techniques from industry conferences. She received an undergraduate degree from University of California, Berkeley and a graduate degree from San Diego State University.
Activity: Design Jam Session
Tom Igoe
Tom Igoe is an Associate Arts Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Coming from a background in theatre lighting design, he teaches courses and workshops in physical computing and networking, exploring ways to allow digital technologies to sense and respond to a wider range of human physical expression. Current research focuses on ecologically sustainable practices in technology development and how open hardware development can contribute to that.
Igoe has written two books on physical computing: “Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers,”co-authored with Dan O’Sullivan, and “Making Things Talk” Both have been adopted by digital art and design programs around the world. He is a regular contributor to MAKE magazine on the subject as well. He is also a member of the core development team of Arduino, an open source microcontroller environment built for non-technicians. He has consulted for The American Museum of the Moving Image, EAR Studio, Diller + Scofidio Architects, Eos Orchestra, HBO, and others. He is a collaborator on the Arduino open source microcontroller project. He is currently realizing a lifelong dream to work with monkeys as well.
Open Source Design Review and Brainstorming Session
Harnish Jani
Jani brings to RKS extensive experience in research and strategy. He has a Masters in Industrial Design from North Carolina State University and two undergraduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Mumbai. He has an eclectic mix of experience from working at Dell, Ignition, Larsen & Toubro, NCSU College of Management, SymbientPD, and Gamil. Jani passionately leverages his multifaceted background in strategy, design, technology and culture to create compelling strategic solutions for user experience and brand enhancement.
Predictable Magic: Designing Emotional Interactions and Business Results
Jon Kolko
Keynote Speaker
Jon Kolko is an Associate Creative Director at frog design. He has extensive experience in the professional world of interaction design, working around complicated technological constraints in order to best solve the problems of Fortune 500 clients. His work has extended into the domains of consumer electronics, mobility, supply chain management, demand planning, and customer-relationship management, and he has worked with clients such as AT&T, HP, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Ford, IBM, Palm and other leaders of the Global 2000. The underlying theme of these problems and projects was the creation of a solution that was useful, usable, and desirable. He is the author of the text Thoughts on Interaction Design published by Morgan Kaufmann, and he sits on the Board of Directors for the IxDA.
My Heart is in The Work
Mike Kruzeniski, Microsoft
Mike Kruzeniski is a UX Creative Director for the Entertainment Experience Group at Microsoft, in Seattle. Before joining Microsoft, Mike was a Designer on Nokia Design’s Insight & Innovation team in Los Angeles, where he worked on projects such as the Nokia 2010 View of the Future, and the concept design for the Nokia 8800 Arte. He has a Master’s of Interaction Design from the Umea Institute of Design in Sweden, and a Bachelor of Industrial Design from the Emily Carr Institute of Design in Vancouver, BC.
Poetry & Polemics in Creating Experience
Livia Labate, Comcast / IAI
Livia Labate is a user experience designer practicing in Philadelphia at Comcast Interactive Media. She also currenty on the IA Institute Board of Directors and co-chairing the 2010 and 2011 IA Summits. In other words, she loves the UX world and enjoys giving back to the community.
Ceci n’est pas une KPI
Alexis Lloyd, The New York Times
Alexis Lloyd is a Creative Technologist for the Research and Development group at The New York Times Company. She is responsible for researching technology trends and prototyping future interfaces for content consumption across multiple platforms and devices.
In addition to her work at the Times, Ms. Lloyd has over 12 years experience as a multimedia and interaction designer, and has designed award-winning projects for clients such as FOX, Columbia University, American Express, The New York Historical Society, PBS, and others. In addition, her new media art and design work has been shown internationally, in such venues as SIGGRAPH, the Chelsea Art Museum, Artgadgets (Netherlands), MAD Emergent Arts Center (Netherlands), the Melvin Art Gallery, and Symphony Space. Ms. Lloyd holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons The New School for Design.
New Interactions With News
Erin Malone, tangible ux
Erin Malone, a Principal with Tangible UX, has over 20 years of experience leading design teams and developing social experiences for companies like Yahoo!, AOL, AltaVista, Intuit and others. She is the founder of the Yahoo! Pattern Library and a founding member of the IA Institute.
Designing Social Interfaces: The Game
Ezio Manzini
Keynote Speaker
Professor of Design at the Politecnico di Milano, Honorary Doctor at The New School of New York (2006) and at the Goldsmiths College of London (2008) and honorary professor at the Glasgow School of Art (2009).
Presently, his main interests are towards design for social innovation and, in particular, towards the promotion of DESIS, an international network on Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (http://www.desis-network.org). Recent publications: Collaborative services. Social innovation and design for sustainability (Polidesign. Milano, 2008) and Service Design in the Age of Networks and Sustainability (in: Miettinen, S., Koivisto, M., ed., Designing Services, University of Arts and Design, Helsinki, 2009).
Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability
Peter Morville
Peter Morville is a writer, speaker, and consultant. His bestselling books include Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Ambient Findability. He advises such clients as AT&T, Harvard, IBM, the Library of Congress, Microsoft, the National Cancer Institute, Vodafone, and the Weather Channel. His work on experience design and the future of search has been covered by Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal. Peter’s latest book, Search Patterns, was published in 2010. He blogs at findability.org.
The Future of Search
Ko Nakatsu
Ko Nakatsu is a senior design researcher and strategist at RKS Design. He works on product and service strategies for international clients. His excitement for design led him to work as an interaction and search designer at McMaster-Carr, a site that ranked third (behind Amazon and Barnes and Noble) in trust and credibility by Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab. Ko continued his design passion in the Advanced Planning and Strategy department at Nissan North America where he developed future 2013 to 2023 human transportation concepts for global production and cultural inspiration. He received a BFA in industrial design from Carnegie Mellon University.
Predictable Magic: Designing Emotional Interactions and Business Results
Rob Nero, Malmö University
Rob Nero is currently working on his Master’s thesis at the Interaction Design Masters program at Malmö University, in Malmö, Sweden. Before deciding to move to Sweden, he designed enterprise web applications for large and Fortune 500 companies for 10 years. Rob’s design projects while attending the Masters program include a music remix web site that was used in a national campaign for refugees, a Bluetooth-enabled music distribution box for an inner-city hip-hop club, and multiple physical prototyping projects with the Arduino platform.
After graduation in 2010, Rob is seeking employment opportunities in the physical and tangible interface areas. He hopes to continue his work in rapid physical prototyping, electronics, and people interaction in every adventure and future employment.
TRKBRD: From Idea to Conception with Physical Prototyping
Nicolas Nova, Lift lab
Nicolas Nova is both researcher at Liftlab – with a specific interest in user experience and foresight in particular with regards to future technologies/practices and their implications – and the editorial manager of the Lift conferences (Switzerland, South Korea, France). He has a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the Swiss Institute of Technology (EPFL, Lausanne) where he also worked as a research scientist at the Media and Design Lab.
He runs field studies that aim at informing design projects for various companies and institutions in domains such as mobile/urban/location-based applications, tangible and gestural interactions, social computing, gaming and networked objects.
He blogs at Pasta and Vinegar, about future technologies/practices and their implications. He speaks and lectures widely on these topics at such institutions and conferences as Mediamatic (Amsterdam), the Institute for the Future (Palo Alto), Experientia (Torino), the Annenberg Center for Communication (Los Angeles), Ubicomp, NordicCHI to name just a few. He teaches design research at ENSCI (Paris) and HEAD (Geneva).
From Observing Failures to Provoking Them
Lara Penin
Lara Penin, PhD is a full-time Professor of Transdisciplinary Design at the School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design, where she teaches at the Design and Management and Integrated Design programs. Her work focuses on Design for Sustainability, Design for Sustainable Social Innovation and Service Design. At Parsons, she coordinates the Area of Study of Service Design and is co-founder and member of the Research Lab Design and Social Innovation for Sustainability (DESIS Lab).
Lara has a successful record of research, education and development projects on an international scale. In her previous position as a research consultant at Milan Polytechnic University, she has managed the project “Creative Communities for Sustainable Lifestyles”, funded by the United Nations’ Task Force on Sustainable Lifestyles, dedicated to research and modeling sustainable ways of living in Brazil, India and China through design methods and tools. She has successfully launched and managed the project LENS, the Learning Network on Sustainability, focused on education for Design for Sustainability and Product-Service Systems, financed by the European Commission, coordinated by Milan Polytechnic University in partnership with six universities in Europe and Asia.
She holds a PhD in Industrial Design and Multimedia Communication from Milan Polytechnic University, Italy and a BA in Architecture and Urban Planning from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She has lectured in Europe, China, India and Brazil and has published several papers and articles.
Discussion: DESIS-USA: Demands and Initiatives on Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability in the U.S.
Steve Portigal
Steve Portigal is the principal of Portigal Consulting, a bite-sized firm that helps clients to discover and act on new insights about themselves and their customers. Steve regularly speaks at design and marketing events and writes regularly for interactions, Core77 and the Portigal Consulting blog, All This ChittahChattah. Steve is an avid photographer who has a Museum of Foreign Grocery Products in his home.
Well, we did all this research… now what?
Deepa Prahalad
Deepa Prahalad is co-author of Predictable Magic. She holds a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from the University of Michigan as well as an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Passionate about emerging markets and innovation, her career has included roles as a commodities trader (based in Asia) and as a management consultant. She also authored the first business plan and raised capital for Safe-Med, now an analytic engine used by Google Health.
Predictable Magic: Designing Emotional Interactions and Business Results
Dan Saffer
Dan Saffer is a founder and principal at the design consultancy Kicker Studio. Dan has designed devices, software, websites, and services since 1995, and these products are currently used by millions every day. An acclaimed speaker and author, his two books are Designing for Interaction, Second Edition (New Riders) and Designing Gestural Interfaces (O’Reilly). Dan is an internationally-recognized thought leader on design who has spoken at conferences and taught workshops on interaction design all over the world. He has a Masters of Design in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University, and his design innovations have received several patents.
Brainstorming and Design Principles Workshop
Dennis Schleicher, Sears
Dennis Schleicher uses his background in business and industrial anthropology to design interactive products to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives. In addition to being a past chair of the largest Information Architecture Summit, he continues to be a leading force in the design community and is actively involved with the Information Architecture Institute, the ASIST Special Interest Group of Information Architecture, Overlap, and the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Dennis is Director, User Experience Architecture at Sears Holdings in Chicago. He has worked with American Public University Systems, Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, United States Air Force, Microsoft, Comcast, Dominos, White Castle, Bosch, and Numara. His corporate pedigree includes work at Argus Associates, the company that wrote the book on Information Architecture, and the Ford account at JWT, the largest account at the largest advertising company in the US.
Activity: Bodystorming
Nathan Shedroff
Keynote Speaker
Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the ground-breaking MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, CA. He is one of the pioneers in Experience Design, Interaction Design and Information Design. He speaks and teaches internationally and has written extensively on design and business issues, including, Experience Design 1 and maintains a website with resources on Experience Design at www.nathan.com/ed. He’s a serial entrepreneur, works in several media, and consults strategically for companies to build better, more meaningful experiences for their customers. His latest book, Making Meaning, co-written with two members of Cheskin, a Silicon Valley-based strategy consultancy, explores how companies can specifically create products and services to evoke meaning in their audiences and customers.
Meaningful Innovation Relies on Interaction and Service Design
Kendra Shimmell, Lextant
My unique combination of skills allows me to move fluidly between design research and interaction design. While at lextant, I have worked on diverse projects including health care systems, retail environments, medical devices, financial service design, and enterprise management applications.
I am responsible for both account and project management, however my true passion is in designing solutions that resonate with consumers. I’ve been told that I have an innate ability to immerse myself in the consumer’s domain. My sensitivity to both implicit and explicit communications between people, artifacts, and context of use allows me to excel in identifying patterns, breakdowns, and opportunities.
On the client level, my goal is to align interdisciplinary teams around a common goal by facilitating communication across the disciplines of marketing, business, design, and engineering. I have established productive partnerships with companies such as Cardinal Health, CheckFree, Cordis, Dell, Diebold, Hewlett-Packard, Hollister, Hunter, Moen, Nationwide Insurance, and GE Healthcare.
Environments: The Future of Interaction Design
Kel Smith, Anikto LLC
Kel Smith is a nationally recognized authority on Web accessibility, with a list of publications that have been cited by the Pentagon Library, Kent State’s Knowledge Management Program, and the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. In February 2008 he founded Anikto (ah-NEEK-toh) as a consultancy to explore and support the creation of barrier-free digital experiences spanning multiple disciplines, markets and contexts. He presented on the topic of virtual world applications at the CSUN 2009 Technology Conference for Persons with Disabilities and at the TechShare 2009 conference in London, UK. Kel is a member of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and the Information Architecture Institute (IAI), and he currently serves as Vice Chair of the Philadelphia chapter of ACM/SIG-CHI for computer-human interaction. He earned his BFA in photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art and studied cognitive science as part of MS program at Philadelphia University.
The Use of Virtual Worlds Among People with Disabilities
Donna Spencer
Donna Spencer is a freelance information architect, interaction designer, world-renowned speaker and workshop leader, and author of a wildly popular book about card sorting. (Seriously, it’s bigger than “The Da Vinci Code” in Slovenia.) She’s Australian so she talks funny and laughs a lot, both of which should make Visual Thinker’s Pictionary a big hit.
Visual Thinker’s Pictionary
Sara Summers
Sara Summers is a User Experience Evangelist for Microsoft based out of Austin, TX. Sara is currently coauthoring a book for experience designers, entitled Dynamic Prototyping, expected to be on bookshelves early 2010. She has a personal mantra of design democracy – happy, healthy designers and developers working and playing together to create beautiful, inspirational products.
Sara speaks often and loves to talk about big ideas, changing everything, breaking your toys, throwing away your designs and capturing new ideas. In search for the best design process recipes she has worked for several renowned agencies; Frog Design, Young Rubicam, Projekt202, and with good people like; AMD, HP, Logitech, Microsoft, Motorola, NFL and Sony. For over 14 years, she has been deeply involved in the production and development of product strategy, vision and design, guiding and influencing design process with each team and project.
Sara reads everything she can get her hands on and prides herself in being an armchair social and cognitive scientist and researcher. Academically, she is trained as a technologist and visual designer, with a BS in Computer Graphics Technology, from Purdue University.
Microsoft Expression: The team that plays together stays together
Martin Tomitsch
Martin Tomitsch is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Sydney. He teaches Interaction Design (undergrad) and Human-Computer Interaction (postgrad). In his free time (aka ‘research’) he likes to think about interactions beyond the screen. This quest has also inspired his PhD on the use of interaction design methodologies for designing smart environments, which he completed in 2008. Before joining the University of Sydney he taught User Interface Design and Usability Engineering at the Vienna University of Technology and worked as usability consultant at a Vienna-based R&D spin-off.
Discussion: Who’s Gonna Teach the Next Generation?
Guillermo Torres, Adobe
Guillermo Torres is part of Adobe’s XD team where as a Sr. UX Designer he works on crafting the experience for products like Flash Catalyst. Prior to joining Adobe, he navigated between interaction design and development at AKQA and Method. Always bringing a mix of both left and right brain to everything he does. In his 10 years of in the industry he has created engaging, award winning interactive experiences for global brands such as Nike, Microsoft, Visa and Target.
Rapid Prototyping with Adobe Flash Catalyst
Jeanne Turner, iSITE
Jeanne Turner is the Leader of IxDA Portland and an Information Architect at ISITE Design. At ISITE, Jeanne conducts user research to understand the needs and goals of people in a variety of target audiences — such as academic researchers trying to peruse colleagues’ working papers and restaurateurs eager to source food from local farmers. She applies that understanding to the design of thoughtful and appropriate interactive experiences. Outside of ISITE, Jeanne plans design jam sessions, coordinates lectures and workshops, and serves the IxD community. She has a degree in Computer Science with a focus on human-computer interaction from the University of Hawaii.
Activity: Design Jam Session
Russ Unger
Russ Unger is the Director of Experience Planning for Draftfcb, the largest advertising/marketing agency in the Midwest. Russ has been working on websites since 1993 – when there was only Notepad to code with and Mosaic was the only browser around. That was when he found his interest in User Experience Design and Information Architecture began to flourish.
Since then, he has worked with a number of major brands, including Gatorade, Propel, Quaker and Celebrity Cruise Lines, as well as on large scale Intranet and Extranet applications for such companies as Volkswagen Credit, Audi Financial Services, Information Resources, Inc. and Marsh. He has been involved in the Information Architecture for large-scale public-facing sites for such companies as Metromix, Oprah.com, United Airlines and Hewlett-Packard. He has also worked off-line, creating unique biometric (fingerprint reader) applications and has worked as the Design Lead for Motorola’s Connectivity domain where he was responsible for creating user interfaces for mobile applications in Motorola’s Consumer Experience Design group. Russ worked closely with such major carriers as T-Mobile, Cingular/AT&T and Vodafone to design features for Bluetooth, WiFi and over-the-air updates. He has also taught courses in Web and Interactive/Flash Design.
In his spare time, he is an author and editor for Boxes and Arrows, a well-known online Information Architecture magazine. In addition to being a mentor for the Information Architecture Institute, Russ also serves on the 2200+ member organization’s Board of Directors as the Director of Events and Marketing. As if that is not enough, he tries to actively blog on topics in User Experience Design at UserGlue UserBlog.
Russ is co-author of the book A Project Guide to User Experience Design with Carolyn Chandler for Peachpit Press (Voices That Matter).
The Right Way to Wireframe
Greg Vassallo, Moment
Greg Vassallo is a Senior Associate in the User Experience Design group at Moment, an independent interaction design firm in New York. Greg holds a Bachelor’s degree in photography from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, and a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University.
Greg’s work focuses on generative research, design strategy, information architecture, and interaction design for web-based and mobile applications. He’s passionate about user experience design and how it can change the world. He also has a slightly unhealthy fetish for wireframes and design documentation.
10 Things I Learned About Being a Design Consultant While Living in the Hospital For a Year
Kate Walser, CX Insights
Kate Walser became a user experience designer in 1997. Since then, she’s talked with and observed audiences from lower-literacy, rural patients to business professionals and high-wealth consumers to understand what their users want and design Web sites and software that make sense to users and engage them. She’s worked with the US Departments of Health & Human Services, Justice, Defense, and Veterans Affairs; US Postal Service; IRS; Small Business Administration; and Commonwealth of Virginia; as well as companies including AXA/Equitable, T. Rowe Price, and PEPCO. Her work has received awards, including eHealthcare and Government Trailblazer awards. She’s presented at conferences including Social Media for Government, The New New Internet Conference, Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) International, and The Internet Security Conference.
Kate established and led Usability Centers of Excellence at SRA International and American Management Systems, before starting a consulting division focused on customer experiences, CX Insights, at Tritus Technologies. She serves on several advisory boards, including the DC chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA-DC) and the Section 508 refresh federal advisory committee.
The Change We Need Needs IxD: Designing Gov 2.0 that’s Inclusive
Dan Willis
Dan Willis has been building Web products and creating “no-duh” deliverables for something like a hundred years and although he usually hides behind his alter ego UX Crank, he has agreed not to wear a mask for the duration of this session. At least not on his face.
Visual Thinker’s Pictionary
Denise Wilton
Denise Wilton is the Creative Director of award winning online print company moo.com.
A varied role, she is responsible for the creation of the brand, from the visual look and feel both on and offline, to the tone of voice in written, customer-facing communication. She is also the community manager – and with her third hand, makes a mean cup of tea.
Working as a designer for over 15 years, she has held various senior design roles in traditional and online media.
Denise is also co-founder of the large online creative community, b3ta.com, which, she warns, is not for the faint-hearted.
Writing for Relationships (and applications)
Indi Young
You will find Indi working on design projects and running mental model research for clients, teaching, writing, and craving chocolate in Marin County, where she unfortunately does not have a hot tub. She thinks she got turned on to design research by reading C.J. Cherryh’s Cyteen series while she was a software engineer back in the 80’s. She’s a co-founder of Adaptive Path and writes a blog at Rosenfeld Media. If anything can be said about her workshops, she will honestly make you feel more comfortable chatting to strangers at cocktail parties.
Mental Model Diagrams Workshop (Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior)
Jeremy Yuille
Jeremy Yuille is an interaction designer, digital media artist and academic with a background in digital art, music, performance and architecture. He has a Bachelor of Design Studies from the Architecture department of the University of Queensland and a Masters of Design from SIAL at RMIT University. Jeremy is a co-founder of the Media and Communication Design Studio at RMIT, where he undertakes collaborative research with the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID), supervises postgraduate students, and holds interaction design studios. He is also a certified scrum-master, and a director of the Interaction Design Association.
As teachers in design programs, both Jeremy and Martin are very experienced with facilitating professional and student input in a discussion format. They can also tap-dance when required.
Discussion: Who’s Gonna Teach the Next Generation?
Todd Zaki Warfel
Todd Zaki Warfel, founder and principal designer at Messagefirst, has been designing products and services for over 15 years. Todd’s clients have included AT&T Wireless, Bankrate, Citibank, and Comcast, Numara and NYU just to name a few.
An internationally recognized thought leader on research and design, and author of the prototyping course for the Web Standards Project Education Task Force, he has spoken at conferences and taught workshops around the globe.
His new book, Prototyping: a practitioner’s guide, discusses how prototypes are more than just a design tool and shows you how to use prototyping to create a common language, market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team.
Todd currently lives in Philadelphia, blogs at zakiwarfel.com, and twitters at @zakiwarfel.
The Right Way to Wireframe