danah boyd is a Social Scientist 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.
At the Berkman Center, danah co-directed the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, formed by the U.S. Attorney’s General and MySpace and organized by the Berkman Center to identify potential technical solutions for keeping children safe online. She is currently co-directing the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative, funded by the MacArthur Foundation.
danah maintains a blog called Apophenia, a valuable resource for anyone interested in social media.
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.
Dr. Bell is also an accomplished industry pundit on the intersection of culture and technology and a regular public speaker and panelist at technology conferences worldwide. Her first book, Divining the Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing, was co-written with Professor Paul Dourish of University of California at Irvine and released in April 2011. In 2010, Bell was named one of Fast Company’s inaugural “100 Most Creative People in Business.” She also is the recipient of several patents for consumer electronics innovations.
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.
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. He teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Art in New York and lectures extensively on all continents.
A native of Austria, he received his MFA from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and, as a Fulbright Scholar, a master’s degree from Pratt Institute in New York.
Angel Kittiyachavalit is a visual and user experience designer. 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.
As a 2012 Code for America Fellow, she is working with the city of Chicago to build an Open311 Dashboard that displays real-time data about 311 service requests. The Dashboard will empower citizens and government officials to monitor requests and make better decisions.
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, TEDx, and The Economist. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Meghan, and their dog, Milo.
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. During those fun times, he co-chaired Interaction10, a much-loved conference that pushed the boundaries of the attendees’ experience. Bill is also known for researching and talking about how the history of the button personifies the history of interaction design.
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. Working with toy inventors, manufacturers, and game designers from all over the industry and the country has given him a unique perspective on technology and toys, and their potential for twenty-first century interactive play.
Bill is currently working on pushing the boundaries of toy / technology integration, and merging toys and play patterns with the internet of things.
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.
He has a diverse background including (but not limited to) zoological field research, naturalist, instruction of English as a foreign language, professional chef, startup entrepreneur and network analyst. The web is a special place where we can make a living by understanding groups and trying to make something cool. Brad is excited to be a part of the process at JESS3.
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. He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in articles and scientific papers as well as science fiction short stories and novels (Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices we Love, Fake Plastic Love, and Nebulous Mechanisms: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories). He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter.
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.
Her past work has been with museums and design consultancies, including IDEO, where she led teams as an environments designer. Brianna is also an adjunct faculty member at John F. Kennedy University.
Brianna holds a Master of Arts in Museum Studies from John F. Kennedy University, and a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Design from the University of California at Davis.
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. He was also formerly Senior Information Architect at CNN.com and has previously worked for or with companies such as Corbis, Microsoft, Nokia, General Motors and AT&T Wireless. He has also spent time with a number of start-up ventures, spanning information architecture, interaction design and visual and communications design.
Chris holds an MFA in design from the Savannah College of Art & Design, has taught design at NYU’s school for continuing education. He has a passion for designing typefaces and gives presentations on type design to graduate level design students.
Chris is also a magnet for stray dogs and is currently trying to learn the craft of watchmaking.
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.
Dawn Danby is the Sr Sustainable Design Program Manager at Autodesk.
Dawn has spent 13 years working across disciplines in sustainable design, with projects ranging from a tree-covered pedestrian bridge on the US-Canada border to closed-loop manufacturing strategies. At Autodesk, Dawn leads the Sustainability Workshop, which provides free, lightweight videos and resources online to teach young engineers, designers, and architects the principles and practice of sustainable design. Dawn co-authored the bestselling Worldchanging: A User’s Guide to the 21st Century. She has given dozens of talks around the world, spoke at TEDGlobal in 2005, and was recognized by Fast Company in 2009 as one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business.
Dawn teaches in the Design Strategy MBA at the California College of Arts and is a board member at Catapult Design. She has an industrial design degree from RISD and an MBA in Sustainable Business from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute. She has a secret identity as a medical illustrator, and curates Reorb.it, a series of literary performances over social media.
Elizabeth Hunt is a user experience strategist and designer. 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.
As a 2012 Code for America Fellow, she is developing a citizen’s “toolkit” that will collect, celebrate, and share best practices for civic activities like hosting a block party or organizing a neighborhood cleanup.
Emily Wright is a designer and graphic artist focused on usability and visual storytelling. She has 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.
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. Her team is building Prepared.ly — an application that will help citizens and local government collaborate in order to prepare for wildfires and conserve water.
Gina Trapani is the creator of ThinkUp and Todo.txt apps. She was the founding editor of Lifehacker, the seminal productivity blog which garnered nominations for Blog of the Decade and yielded the best-selling book, Lifehacker. She co-hosts popular web show This Week in Google and has become the foremost independent voice on the technology efforts of web titan Google. Fast Company named Gina one of the “Most Influential Women in Technology” in 2009 and 2010, and Wired magazine awarded her its prestigious “Rave Award” in 2006.
Heidi McBride is Director of Research and Strategy, TEAGUE
Heidi McBride 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. Working for clients such as SC Johnson, The Boeing Company, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, Heidi enjoys the challenge of coaching her team through ambitious and sometimes ambiguous projects, inspiring them to look beyond obvious solutions without fear of failure. Heidi is passionate about leveraging technology to challenge traditional business models and enable compelling experiences. Her workplace mantra? Don’t let the urgent displace important.
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.
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. He also fried burgers at McDonald’s, sold cigarettes at 7-11, and tidied up the giftware section at Marshalls.
Jamin is a member of the Service Design Network Advisory Board. He contributed to the book, This Is Service Design Thinking, and frequently speaks about service design and design practice at conferences and workshops. He also organizes Service Design Drinks in San Francisco.
More importantly, he plays soccer, writes poetry, draws, and makes beer.
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. Some of his clients include Motorola, ASICS, BBVA, NXP, John Muir Health, Goldman Sachs, Boston Ballet, Hasbro and Harvard Business School.
Jared has a Masters of Design from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design, and a Bachelor of Design with an emphasis in visual communication, rhetoric and semiotics, from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design.
When he isn’t viewing reality through the lens of design, Jared enjoys losing time in used bookstores and developing his skills as an amateur musicologist. If things had turned out differently, he’d probably be a roadie for Slayer. Or a librarian.
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.
Jennifer worked as an architect in a former life, which may, or may not, relate to her passion for designing and building cocktails.
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. Recently, she ran the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 events for TechWeb and co-chaired the successful Web 2.0 Expo. She is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Oakland, CA with her daughter and six chickens.
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.
In 2005, Jesse gained worldwide attention for coining the term “Ajax” and defining the concepts behind this emerging trend in web technology. Since then, Ajax has become one of the driving forces in web product design, and Jesse’s leadership role in this trend has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek.
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. From 2010 to 2012 he was tech lead for interactive news stories at the Associated Press in New York, transitioning the team from Flash to responsive design HTML. He now heads the Overview Project, a Knight News Challenge-funded semantic visualization system for very large document sets, for the benefit of investigative journalists and other curious people.
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.
Kim has led projects involving a tremendous range of design problems, including web sites, complex analytical and enterprise applications, phones, medical devices, services, and even organizations. Her clients and employers have included everything from one-man startups to the world’s largest companies, as well as universities and government agencies. This range of experience and a passion for teaching have led to Kim’s popularity as an author and as a speaker at conferences and companies around the world.
For the past decade Maren Connary has been applying a user-centered approach to communication and design in the healthcare space and currently works for Kaiser Permanente as an Innovation Consultant in the Innovation and Advanced Technology group. She has led 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.
Maren also organizes an annual healthcare innovation unconference (HealthCamp) to help facilitate and promote the design, development, and distribution of consumer healthcare technologies which will engage, motivate, and encourage individuals to take ownership of their health and well being. Maren holds a BFA in Graphic Design, an MBA in Marketing, and is an avid observer of trends in imbedded and implanted sensor technologies, self-tracking methodologies, artificial intelligence, and data visualization.
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.
Maria’s background spans the disciplines of user experience strategy and design; content strategy; software and hardware design; and development, product management, technical communications and public relations.
As a writer, Maria has authored many articles and white papers, contributed content for McGraw-Hill and served as technical reviewer for Ziff-Davis. Her most recent contribution appears in Les Freed’s PC Magazine Guide to Home Networking. She’s currently an editor at Boxes and Arrows.
Maria is active in the design community and is a member of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), the Information Architecture Institute (IAI) and the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of ACM SIGCHI (BayCHI). She founded and led IxDA Atlanta and is a Local Leader for IxDA San Francisco. At the IxDA’s Interaction 10 conference, she gave a talk titled, “Interaction Design for the 4th Dimension” in which she explored temporal considerations for design.
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.
Mary believes good design and innovation come from collaboration between cross functional teams, and through close attention to user insights, business goals, and some instinct. She believes in adhering to standards while always looking for opportunities for invention.
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. Her methodologies have been taught at several universities and her work has been recognized in books regularly throughout her career.
Melissa is the co-author of Content Strategy for the Web, 2nd edition; a columnist for Contents magazine; and can be found blogging at BrainTraffic.com/blog.
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. Until 2006, he was Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia. He is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UC Berkeley.
de Monchaux’s work has been published and reviewed in Log, Architectural Design, the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, and have been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Macdowell Colony, the Santa Fe Institute, and the Smithsonian Institution. The work of his Oakland-based design studio has been exhibited widely, including at the 2010 Biennial of the Americas and SFMOMA, and will be featured in the US Pavillion of the 13th Venice Architecture Bienalle in fall 2012. He has received design awards and citations from the International Union of Architects, Pamphlet Architecture, and the Van Alen Institute, who awarded him the 2000 John Dinkeloo Memorial Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.
It’s no wonder Noah Smith can quickly distill a complex concept. He was born and raised on a Civil War battlefield (note: not actually during the War). Now that’s some tricky dinnertime conversation.
A native of the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, Noah has worked as a professional image maker for the last 11 years. He considers himself a storyteller — one whose medium is the clear, eye-catching symbol.
He began his career as a Flash animator in Austin, TX, taking inspiration from “School House Rock.” Since then, he has worked across a range of mediums: TV, video games, graphic novels, music videos, print and cartoons. He firmly believes infographics are sexy.
He now resides with his wife in Los Angeles. As an art director for JESS3, his clients include Google, ESPN, Estee Lauder, Amnesty International, Eloqua and The Economist.
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. In addition to managing the consulting practice, Patrick led initiatives primarily at Fortune 500 clients, including The Coca-Cola Company, Lowe’s, Estée Lauder, and UPS, and crafted strategies and concepts across numerous industries and genres. (Yes, he likes to keep busy).
Patrick received a MS in Information Design & Technology from the Georgia Institute of Technology, but he is thankful everyday for his humanities degree in English from the Honors College at the University of South Carolina. In fact, he urges leaders in business and technology to look to the humanities more for inspiration, innovation, and an invaluable counterweight to industrial-era management techniques. (Buy him some coffee, and he will talk your ears off about it).
When not scribbling design ideas on walls, Patrick can usually be found walking around a city in search of a great meal, viewing an engaging film, or losing himself in a good book. He also loves to travel and hopes you will invite him to speak, teach, or consult in your neck of the woods soon. (Especially if you are in Dublin. He loves that town).
Paul works as a Product Manager at Facebook. He is widely recognized as a leading thinker on designing social interactions and spent the past four years leading user research for Google’s social projects including Google+, Gmail, Mobile and YouTube. Before Google, Paul worked as a User Experience Consultant at Flow, leading research and design projects for clients including the BBC, The Guardian, Vodafone, UK Government and Betfair. Before Flow, he worked as an Industrial Designer, designing electronic appliances at Dyson and car interiors at Faurecia. Paul holds a Master of Science in Interactive Media and a Bachelor of Industrial Design. He writes a popular blog at ThinkOutsideIn.com.
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.’”
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.
Rebecca is a pioneer in bringing Applied Improvisational theatre to the world of business. Clients include: Apple Inc., The Museum of Science Boston, and Animation Mentor. Rebecca teaches improv classes and acting at Pixar Animation Studios, Dreamworks Animation, and Lucas Film.
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.
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. Samantha regularly teaches at the University of Washington, and enjoys speaking about experience design and how to gain support for increasing its organizational value and visibility. She is active in the design and experience communities, participates in many conferences and events, and is starting to work on a book about holistic experience design.
Sheba Najmi is a user experience designer and product strategist. 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.
As a 2012 Code for America Fellow, Sheba is working with the city of Honolulu. She is working on an application that stimulates citizen commitment to a sustainability campaign, and is also helping city officials experiment with social media as a vehicle for communicating with citizens.
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.
Prior to venturing out on his own, Stephen spent more than a decade building and leading teams of information architects, interaction designers and UI developers. He’s designed Web applications for technology startups as well as corporate clients like Nokia, Frito-Lay, Sabre Travel Network, and Chesapeake Energy.
Between public speaking and project work, Stephen offers workshops and training to help organizations manage creative teams, make use of visual thinking, and design better customer experiences.
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.
She lives in Bristol, UK with her husband and when she isn’t designing, she spends her free-time hiking, getting lost in a good book and studying Japanese.
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. Toi fell in love with design and all of its intricate details, subtle simplicities, complex processes, challenging functionalities, and never-ending flexibility as a student of The School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design. Before joining Adaptive Path, she worked in design research and development at a major cancer center facilitating co-creation projects with clinicians, administration, and patients to design positive experiences for patients and their families.
Growing up surfing, snowboarding, skiing, skateboarding and generally being outdoors has greatly influenced her personal design interests and style. When not at work, Toi is likely on the slopes, at the movies, or at the beach with her dog.
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. He writes and talks extensively about many areas of technology, including the Web of Data, social software and network-enabled physical objects and environments. He also advises start-ups like Lanyrd and Weathermob.
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.
The web is a big, exciting place. Veronica adores being able to take a piece and plan it, build it, and find out how to make it better. When not living in the world of user experience, Veronica dances Balboa and Lindy Hop, and hangs out in Washington, DC with her cranky Betta fish, Jeremiah.
