CHIFOO 2008 Program Series Speakers

Matt Arnold

July · Understanding the Multi-User Experience

With a strong engineering, design, and modeling background, Matt's contributions to projects include Flash programming, animation, and 3D media development. In addition to providing 2D and 3D visualizations, Matt researches and develops innovative technical and engineering solutions for projects such as the Theban Mapping Project, the Lagoda at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and the World War I Museum. Before coming to Second Story, Matt's experience has been in the design and research of industrial, mobile, and planetary robotics. Matt has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Elizabeth Bacon

May · Death to Personas! Long Live Personas!

Elizabeth Bacon is co-founder and Chief Design Officer at Devise. She received her "post-grad" education in interaction design at Cooper, where she worked for three inspiring years designing interactive systems and helping refine methodology and practice. She then worked for five years at St. Jude Medical, where she was a founding member of the New Product Planning team, designing solutions for implantable medical devices that satisfy and delight customers. She also is a Director of the Interaction Design Association and an active member of CHIFOO. Above all, she is passionate about improving the world through the practice of interaction design and sharing perspectives with fellow practitioners.

Bill Buxton

June · Design Thinking: Action and Ecosystem

Bill Buxton is a designer and a researcher concerned with human aspects of technology.  His work reflects a particular interest in the use of technology to support creative activities such as design, film making, and music.  Bill's research specialties include technologies, techniques and theories of input to computers,  technology mediated human-human collaboration, and ubiquitous computing. In December 2005, he was appointed Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Prior to that, he was Principal of his own Toronto-based boutique design and consulting firm, Buxton Design, where his time was split between working  for clients, lecturing, and trying to finish a long-delayed book on sketching and interaction design.He is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he still works with graduate students. 

Steve Calde

May · Death to Personas! Long Live Personas!

Steve Calde is a Principal Design Consultant at Cooper, where he's been helping to make the digital world a safer place for users since 1998. Steve has worked on scores of design projects in diverse domains such as golf course irrigation, IT administration, online radio, enterprise resource management, intravenous medication delivery, telecommunications, and more. Steve also teaches Cooper's Interaction Design Practicum and Communicating courses. In a previous life, Steve was a technical writer for Rational Systems and GW Associates (semiconductor factory automation).

Matt Cottam

September · Design Thinking in the Field

Matt cofounded Tellart and serves as its Creative Director—he works closely with clients using information architecture and design methods to research challenges, discover opportunities for design, and build strategies and tactics for design interventions. Matt received Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) and Bachelor of Industrial Design degrees (BID) from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). From 1998 to 2003 Matt was a Core Instructor at the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics. Since 1999 he has been a member of the Part-Time Faculty at RISD, and is also a member of the Adjunct Faculty at the Design Institute Umeå, Sweden, where he teaches "Experience Prototyping."  Matt is an Emergency Medical Technician - Cardiac (EMT-C), a National Ski Patroller, and is federally employed as a Medic for the National Disaster Medical System (RI-1 DMAT/HHS.) He has chaired conference sessions, lectured, published, and led workshops internationally on topics including information design, physical computing, collaboration strategies for engineers and designers, design for extreme environments, and design for emergency and disaster medicine.

Nancy Frishberg

November · Fun and Games at Work

Nancy Frishberg is a certified Innovation Games® facilitator.  She practices user-centered design in all phases of product development and delivery, bringing the ideas and prototypes to customers and user for reaction and feedback.  Turning that feedback into actionable results stimulates her to help clients make good products great, innovative and at the same time useable, useful and desirable for the target audience. Her professional career spans industry, academia, and non-profit organizations, as well as consulting.  Besides her current focus on user experience, she has organized the engineering side of business relationships, created award-winning multimedia tools, promoted disability access, and managed technical professionals. A teacher and trainer, she holds a Ph.D. from University of California at San Diego in linguistics. Her book on sign language interpreting, in print continuously for over 20 years, serves as the basis for the national written examinations supervised by the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf.  She's been active in ACM's SIGCHI conferences since 1989, and was a co-chair for the Designing for User eXperience conference held in San Francisco in Fall 2005.

Gary Hirsch

April · Something New Right Away: Ideation from the World of Improvisation

On Your Feet began by mistake. On a wet November morning in 1996 an unsuspecting British ad planner bought a hand painted t-shirt at the Saturday Market in Portland, Oregon. A meeting with the painter of said shirt (a professional improviser) led to an improv-based workshop with (the very open minded) Leo Burnett Advertising.  Soon thereafter, a marketing director, a snow cone king, an anthropologist, a yoga instructor, and an Irish filmmaker joined the group.  Somehow this disparate group turned into a global business that now works with organizations on issues concerning creativity, innovation, communication, and brand action. Clients include Nike, FedEx, Sub-Zero/Wolf, Intel, 3M, The BBC, Disney, Warner Brothers, the British Ministry of Defense, and others.

Mike Kuniavsky

January · Sketching Smart Things: User Experience Design of Ubiquitous Computing Devices

At ThingM, Mike Kuniavsky researches, designs, and writes about people's experiences at the intersection of technology and everyday life. Companies and universities around the world use his 2003 book Observing the User Experience to understand and teach techniques that bring the design of products closer to the people who use them. His next book, Smart Things, expected in 2007 from Elsevier, will discuss user experience design for mobile devices and ubiquitous computing. He has also contributed to a number of other books, including the encyclopedic HCI Handbook (also to appear in 2007) and his articles regularly appear in MAKE magazine. He is a regular presenter at academic conferences focusing on user experience design and ubiquitous computing. In 2001 Mike cofounded Adaptive Path, a leading San Francisco internet consultancy. Previously, he founded the Wired Digital User Experience Lab for Wired Magazine's online division, where he served as the interaction designer of the award-winning search engine, HotBot.

Brenda Laurel

February · Design Research: Process and Provocations

Brenda Laurel is a designer, researcher and writer. Her work focuses on interactive narrative, human-computer interaction, and cultural aspects of technology. She currently serves as chair of the new Graduate Program in Design at California College of the Arts. Her career in human-computer interaction spans over twenty-five years. She holds an M.F.A. and Ph.D. in theatre from the Ohio State University. Brenda was one of the founding members of the research staff at Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto, California, where she coordinated research activities exploring gender and technology. She was also one of the founders and VP of Design of a spinoff company from Interval–Purple Moon–formed to market products based on this research. She served as Chair and graduate faculty member of the graduate Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and also worked as a Senior Director and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs in Menlo Park, California. 

Nathan Shedroff

October · Researching Meaning to Identify More Meaningful Customer Experiences

Nathan Shedroff is the chair of California College of the Art's groundbreaking MBA in Design Strategy. He is one of the pioneers of experience design, an approach to design that encompasses multiple senses and explores the common characteristics in all media that make experiences successful; he also works in the related fields of interaction design and information design. Nathan speaks and teaches internationally and has written extensively on design and business issues, including his recent book, Making Meaning. He is a self-proclaimed "serial entrepreneur" and consults strategically for companies to build better, more meaningful experiences for their customers.

Jen Young

July · Understanding the Multi-User Experience

Jennifer's role at Second Story is to lead all aspects of projects and serve as the primary liaison between the client and the in-house teams to orchestrate, coordinate, schedule, and manage projects through every phase of development. After obtaining a bachelor's degree in Anthropology from St. Lawrence University, she worked at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, where she gained experience in collections management, exhibits, education, and research. Jen recently led the award-winning World War I Museum project in Kansas City, Missouri.