Keynotes

Genevieve Bell

Dr. Genevieve Bell is an Australian-born anthropologist and researcher. As director of User Interaction and Experience in Intel Labs, Dr. Bell leads a research team of social scientists, interaction designers, human factors engineers and computer scientists. This team shapes and helps create new Intel technologies and products that are increasingly designed around people’s needs and desires. In this team and her prior roles, Dr. Bell has fundamentally altered the way Intel envisions and plans its future products so that they are centered around people’s needs rather than simply silicon capabilities. [Read more]

Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal is a visionary game designer and futurist, and she is harnessing the power of Internet games in new ways to help solve some of the biggest challenges facing our world today and tomorrow. In her engaging, forward-thinking book Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal makes the case that the gamer spirit — an attitude of fun, dedicated, collective problem-solving — is our greatest asset as we face the social, economic, wins. and environmental problems of the 21st century. [Read more]

Jensen Harris

Jensen Harris is Director of Program Management for the Windows User Experience Team. He has worked at Microsoft since 1998. Prior to his current job, he was the Group Program Manager of the Microsoft Office User Experience Team, where his team redesigned the user interface for Office 2007 and Office 2010, adding the Ribbon, Live Preview, Backstage View, and other innovations. Jensen attended Yale University and Interlochen Arts Academy, graduating with degrees in music composition. [Read more]

Stefan Sagmeister

Stefan Sagmeister formed the New York based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993 and has since designed for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO, and the Guggenheim Museum. Having been nominated eight times he finally won two Grammies for the Talking Heads and Brian Eno & David Byrne package designs. He also earned practically every important international design award. In 2008 a comprehensive book titled "Things I have Learned in my Life so far" was published by Abrams. Solo shows on Sagmeister Inc's work have been mounted in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Tokyo, Osaka, Prague, Cologne, Seoul and Miami. [Read more]

Danah Boyd [Unable to attend]

danah boyd is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, a Research Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and an Associate Fellow at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society. She has worked as an ethnographer and social media researcher for various corporations, including Intel, Tribe.net, Google and Yahoo!. She has advised and consulted for dozens of other companies. She is a Director on the board of the New Media Consortium, a non-profit consortium of learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. She is on the program committees of major academic and industry conferences, including the Digital Media & Learning Conference and SXSW-Interactive. [Read more]

Talks

Austin Kleon

Austin Kleon is a writer and artist. He’s the author of the bestselling books Steal Like An Artist and Newspaper Blackout. His work has been featured on 20×200, NPR’s Morning Edition, PBS Newshour, and in The Wall Street Journal. He speaks about creativity, visual thinking, and being an artist online for organizations such as SXSW, [Read more]

Bill Derouchey

Bill DeRouchey is creative director at Simple, a financial startup aiming to reboot personal banking through design, technology and service. He's loving tackling a problem that seems mundane, but is instead rich with complexity and can help people in their everyday lives. Previously, he directed interaction design at Ziba Design, designing interfaces for things, from patient monitors to satellite radios to air conditioners. He also served on the global board of directors for IxDA, the Interaction Design Association. [Read more]

Bill McIntyre

Atomocom President Bill McIntyre invents toys for a living. After years of building web applications for IBM eBusiness and The New York Times News Service, among other clients, Bill turned his love of toys, robots, and electronics into Atomocom, a company that invents and builds electronic prototypes for toy inventors, toy manufacturers and game inventors. Bill has developed electronic Barbie prototypes, talking Tron action figures, infrared action games, computer connected dolls, and just about everything in between. [Read more]

Brian David Johnson

The future is Brian David Johnson's business. As a futurist at Intel Corporation, his charter is to develop an actionable vision for computing in 2020. His work is called "future casting"—using ethnographic field studies, technology research, trend data, and even science fiction to provide Intel with a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing. Along with reinventing TV, Johnson has been pioneering development in artificial intelligence, robotics, and using science fiction as a design tool. [Read more]

Brianna Cutts

Brianna Cutts is Visitor Experience and Exhibits Director at the Bay Area Discovery Museum, where she creates immersive experiences designed to engage young children in art and science. Brianna’s fascination with problem solving for spatial designs is enhanced by an interest in learning theory and art history. Her experience spans building locomotion prototypes for the Exploratorium’s Frogs exhibition, researching baseball history for the family Fan Lot at AT&T Park in San Francisco, and leading the exhibition design for the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park. [Read more]

Heidi McBride

Heidi McBride is Director of Research and Strategy at TEAGUE. Heidi has worked as Teague's Director of Research and Strategy since 2006. She earned a BBA from the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University and an MBA from Indiana University. Her work experience is rich and diverse, including notable clients such as McDonalds, Hallmark,Clorox, Target, Motorola, and Pfizer Consumer Healthcare. In her current role at Teague, she leads a team of researchers and strategists who work to identify growth opportunities and provide insight to inspire the design process. [Read more]

Jennifer Pahlka

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America, which works with talented web professionals and cities around the country to promote public service and reboot government. She spent eight years at CMP Media where she led the Game Group, responsible for GDC, Game Developer magazine, and Gamasutra.com; there she also launched the Independent Games Festival and served as executive director of the International Game Developers Association. [Read more]

Jesse James Garrett

Jesse, co-founder and chief creative officer of Adaptive Path, is one of the world's most widely recognized technology product designers. Every day, product designers around the world depend on Jesse's tools and concepts, which have been published in more than a dozen languages. His book, The Elements of User Experience, has been called “brilliant” and “essential” and is considered one of the seminal works on user-centered design. Jesse is a frequent keynote speaker, addressing audiences around the world on product design, user experience and innovation. His writings on these topics have appeared in numerous publications. [Read more]

Jonathan Stray

Jonathan Stray believes in public access to information, hacking for the pleasure of it, and tropical weather. He has an MSc in computer science from the University of Toronto and began his career as an engineer on the Adobe After Effects team in San Francisco. Then he abruptly moved to Hong Kong, picked up an MA in journalism, and worked as a freelance reporter, contributing to the New York Times, Foreign Policy, and Wired. [Read more]

Maren Connary

For the past decade Maren Connary has been applying a user-centered approach to marketing and design in the healthcare space and currently works for Kaiser Permanente. She has led marketing communications and design projects for organizations small to large, from branding a pharmaceutical start-up to redesigning global packaging for the entire line of Bayer’s blood glucose monitors. [Read more]

Maria Cordell

Maria is a Design Director at Adaptive Path. She is passionate about taking a broadly contextual systems approach to problem solving, using multidisciplinary design to produce the most enduring, resilient and enjoyable products and experiences possible. Maria is happiest when she can find new insights, reveal hidden connections and bring clarity to complexity. [Read more]

Nicholas de Monchaux

Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect and urbanist whose work explores the intersections between nature, technology, and the city. He is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), an Architectural history of the Apollo 11 Spacesuit. de Monchaux received a B.A. with distinction in Architecture, from Yale, and his M.Arch. from Princeton. He has worked as a designer for Michael Hopkins & Partners in London, and Diller, Scofidio + Renfro in New York. [Read more]

Peter Merholz

Peter joined Inflection in January 2012 to oversee its User Experience team. Prior to that, Peter helped lead Adaptive Path from its inception. Peter has written for a variety of publications, including the Harvard Business Review Online and regularly presents at conferences all over the world. He co-authored Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World. In 1999, he coined the word 'blog' on his website, peterme.com, when he jokingly shortened 'weblog' into 'we blog.'" [Read more]

Rachel Binx

Rachel Binx works as a design technologist at Stamen Design, where she has done projects for MTV, Oprah, and the MoMA. She has also co-founded Meshu, a jewelry company that turns location data into laser-cut and 3D-printed objects. Rachel is interested in data visualization, design, maps, and math. She spends most of her time writing Javascript, specifically d3.js, and has recently started foraying into webGL. [Read more]

Rob Maigret

Rob Maigret is the SVP of Global Creative at Disney Interactive, the digital entertainment and games segment of The Walt Disney Company. He also built out the Disney Interactive Lab, which is responsible for harnessing emerging technologies to develop products aimed to enhance Disney’s online experiences - including the new Disney.com. [Read more]

Toi Valentine

Toi is an Experience Designer at Adaptive Path. She believes empathy is at the heart of designing meaningful experiences that better meet user needs. Toi is interested in how business strategies and design concepts can relate, affect, and inspire one another. Her multi-disciplinary background in action sports, film, art, design, and healthcare has given her new and diverse perspectives to apply to creating products and services. [Read more]

Tom Coates

Tom Coates is the founder and president of Product Club, a new product development and invention company based in San Francisco. Before that he was Head of Product for the Yahoo incubator Brickhouse where he developed the pioneering location sharing project Fire Eagle. He's also run a small R&D group at the BBC and been Production Editor of TimeOut.com. [Read more]

Veronica Erb

Veronica Erb is a User Experience Designer at EightShapes LLC, where she focuses on research and HTML prototyping. Before joining EightShapes, Veronica moderated user experience research in Rwanda and the United States for an international non-profit called AED. In her largest project, she and three UX volunteers researched ways to help teachers in Rwandan teacher training schools. [Read more]

Workshops

Angel Kittiyachavalit

Angel Kittiyachavalit is a visual and user experience designer and a Code for America Fellow. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Economics. After a marketing internship with ReadyMade Magazine, she decided she wanted a career in design. Her interest in behavioral economics and human psychology led her into user experience design. Most recently she was a user experience designer at a fashion startup, where she launched a user testing program and designed everything from web to print. She also loves learning different languages and speaks English, Thai, Spanish, and some Mandarin. [Read more]

Brad Cohen

Brad Cohen is the Director of Interactive Strategy for JESS3 - a creative agency that specializes in telling stories in interesting and innovative ways. He brings experience as a Creative Design Director and Content Strategist with an understanding of interpersonal and group dynamics on the social web. He has worked in various agency environments helping organizations of all kinds discover and craft messages that resonate within communities. [Read more]

Chris Risdon

Chris Risdon is an Experience Designer at Adaptive Path. Chris’s journeyman path has helped shape his belief that finding the right blend of interaction design and communication design enables people to have compelling and useful experiences. Before joining Adaptive Path, Chris was Senior User Experience Architect at user experience consultancy Macquarium, helping improve the online product experience for clients such as Lowes.com and InterContinental Hotels Group. Prior to that, Chris was Lead User Experience Designer for a start-up in video syndication defining the user experience for all their consumer facing products. [Read more]

Cyd Harrell

As VP of Research at Bolt|Peters, Cyd Harrell coaches the top remote research team in the world. She's a passionate believer in real time research and has taught everyone from interns to senior researchers how to get remote. In the course of more than 200 remote studies, Cyd and her team have made user experience real for clients such as Sony, EA, Volkswagon, Rdio, and Autodesk. Cyd co-founded San Francisco Women on the Web, brought design standards to both the website and the broker desktop at Charles Schwab, and advises Code for America on citizen experience issues. [Read more]

Lydia White took this great photo of me.

Elizabeth Hunt

Elizabeth Hunt is a user experience strategist and designer and a Code for America Fellow. After graduating from the University of New Mexico with a Ph.D. in English Literature, she began working in the technology industry. Over the past ten years, she’s worked as a web designer, instructional designer, user experience designer, and creative director. During that time, she’s designed applications and online experiences, as well as a travel program, for clients such as American Express Travel, Target, and Microsoft. [Read more]

Emily Wright

Emily Wright is a designer and graphic artist focused on usability and visual storytelling. As a 2012 Code for America Fellow, Emily is working with the city of Austin to help homeowners deal with the changing climate in Texas. She has also worked with several Bay Area groups including Banned by the Bay, Red Ink Studios, Intersection for the Arts, Visual Ink, and Babeland. With a background in illustration from California College of Arts, she is always looking for ways to spin a good story that helps explain complicated scenarios and data sets. [Read more]

Greg Nudelman

For over 12 years, Greg has been designing experiences that work for Fortune 500 companies. Greg is the author of Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success (Wiley, 2011). Greg’s second Wiley book on mobile and tablet design is due out later this year. He writes about mobile and tablet UX design on DesignCaffeine.com [Read more]

James Macanufo

James leads the Visual Thinking practice at Xplane | Dachis Group. He believes that visualization is essential to understanding what things are, how they work, and why they matter. He works side-by-side with high tech, government and military clients to shape strategy, transformation and communication programs. With co-authors Dave Gray and Sunni Brown, James has written Gamestorming as a guide to getting started in combining the power of visualization with the structure of the group process. [Read more]

Jamin Hegeman

Jamin Hegeman is a Design Director at Adaptive Path, where he leads project teams and helps define the creative practice. His work includes designing solutions in healthcare, education, finance, media, commerce, and social interaction for an array of clients, from large international organizations to startups. Previously, he was a senior designer at Nokia, a master of design student at Carnegie Mellon University, a web consulting business owner, an editor, and a journalist. [Read more]

Jared Cole

Jared firmly believes that design is a fundamental human instinct and that learning and practicing design gives you a glimpse into what makes us tick. Jared is a Design Director at Adaptive Path. He works closely with organizations to identify new strategic opportunities for product and service innovation, discovering new ways for design to deliver greater value to employees and customers. Jared has had the good fortune of working with all kinds of companies, from small non-profit arts organizations to large multinational financial services, addressing everything from large strategic service and organizational design problems to detailed visual design. [Read more]

Jennifer Fraser

Jennifer Fraser is the Director of Design at Macadamian. After more than fourteen years working as a User Experience Designer, Jennifer has designed a broad range of products that have targeted very different audiences, from creative professionals to large government agencies. She has also had the opportunity to work closely with various technology partners, such as Microsoft, Wacom and HP, to understand their requirements and to create designs to meet their needs, as well as the needs of their customers. [Read more]

Kim Goodwin

Kim Goodwin is the author of the bestselling book, Designing for the Digital Age. Kim helps clients build their own design competencies and cultures, both through organizational consulting and through leading highly collaborative research and design engagements. You may also know Kim from her previous work as Vice-President, Design and General Manager at Cooper, leading an integrated practice of interaction, visual, and industrial designers and the development of the acclaimed Cooper U design curriculum. [Read more]

Mary Piontkowski

Mary Piontkowski, Macadamian’s Director, User Experience, is a user experience specialist who has worked with other high-profile companies such as Adaptive Path, Organic, and Macromedia. Through her strategic approach, creative expertise, and mastery of a variety methods for design and innovation, Mary has helped build robust experiences for Fortune 100 and 500 companies such as Macy's, Levi's, PayPal, Hasbro, Sprint, Allstate, and Microsoft. [Read more]

Melissa Rach

Melissa Rach is vice president of content strategy at Brain Traffic, a world-renowned content strategy firm, where she leads an elite team of content strategists that tackles messy content problems for clients worldwide. Melissa has been working as a communications and content specialist for nearly 20 years. Although she’s worked on all types of enterprise content projects, online content is “secretly” her favorite. Since working on her first interactive project in 1993, she has become a respected authority on how organizations incorporate online content into their overall communications plans. [Read more]

Patrick Quattlebaum

Patrick Quattlebaum is a Design Director at Adaptive Path. Patrick craves taking on the most complex design problems he can find regardless of the medium or context. He passionately advocates for elevating the humanity within institutions to ensure both business and community sustainability. Patrick joined Adaptive Path after nearly a decade of service at Macquarium Intelligent Communications, where he built the firm’s user experience practice from the ground up. Patrick instilled in his organization a philosophy of blending a human-centered design methodology with a pragmatic consultative approach. [Read more]

Paul Adams

Paul Adams is the Global Head of Brand Design at Facebook. He works with the worlds leading brands and ad agencies, using his background in social research and design to help them be successful on Facebook. Previously at Facebook he was the Product Manager responsible for Facebook's ad units. In Nov 2011, Fortune magazine described Paul as "one of Silicon Valley's most wanted." His work has been widely published and cited, and his talk on the future of the web is one of the most viewed presentations online. [Read more]

Rebecca Stockley

A co-founder of BATS Improv, Rebecca has been performing with BATS Company since 1989. Rebecca was the Dean of the BATS School of Improv from 1992 to 2003. Rebecca has been designing and teaching improvisation workshops since 1984. She has created and implemented improvisational theatre workshops and programs for several theatre training programs including: the American Conservatory Theatre Advanced Training Program; The Berkeley Repertory School of Theatre; the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; and Stanford University. [Read more]

Robin Hunicke

Robin Hunicke is currently the Executive Design Wrangler at Tiny Speck, working on the whimsical and creative online game Glitch. A computer scientist and designer by training, she specializes in designing experiences that broaden the range and age of players who enjoy video games. Her prior titles include the PS3 Downloadable sensation Journey, Steven Speilberg's Boom Blox series and MySims for Nintendo Wii. [Read more]

Samantha Starmer

After more than 10 years of customer focused work at companies like Amazon.com and Microsoft, Samantha Starmer is now the Director of Customer Experience at the outdoor gear and apparel company REI (Recreational Equipment Inc.). This work includes leading cross-channel customer experience strategy, design, and information architecture teams, and contributing to the overall leadership of the business. She is passionate about designing and evangelizing for holistic customer experiences that are seamless and provide delight across channels, time, and devices. [Read more]

Sheba Najmi

Sheba Najmi is a user experience designer and product strategist, and a Code for America Fellow. At Yahoo! she was a lead designer for Yahoo! Mail, the company’s flagship service with over two hundred million users. Most recently, Sheba co-founded a startup focused on the oft-overlooked baby boomer and senior citizen audiences. She earned an MS degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, where she investigated the language, thought, and interaction of humans and computers. [Read more]

Stephen P. Anderson

Stephen P. Anderson is an internationally recognized speaker and consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He created the Mental Notes card deck, a tool that’s widely used by product teams to apply psychology to interaction design. He’s also of the author of the book Seductive Interaction Design, which explores this topic of psychology and design in more detail. [Read more]

Tiffany Farrant-Gonzalez

Tiffany is currently a Senior Information Designer at JESS3, where she spends her day turning reams of data into beautiful visualizations. Since graduating 3 years ago with a first-class honors degree in New Media, Tiffany has freelanced for a number of organizations including Fast Company and Column Five Media, and during her time at JESS3 has worked on many data visualization projects for clients such as Google, Microsoft and American Express. Her work has been featured all over the web including Huffington Post, GOOD and FastCo Design, and most recently you will be able to find a few of her graphics in Taschen's new book, Information Graphics. [Read more]

Todd Zaki Warfel

Todd Zaki Warfel is a craftsman who loves designing with data, grids, and type. As a Sr. UX Designer at Inflection, he's currently tackling big data design challenges for mobile, tablet, and desktop applications. [Read more]

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