Jon Kolko is the Founder and Director of Austin Center for Design, a progressive educational institution teaching interaction design and social entrepreneurship. His work focuses on bringing the power of design to social enterprises, with an emphasis on entrepreneurship and large-scale industry disruption. He has worked extensively with both startups and Fortune 500 clients, and he has a breadth of experience in consumer electronics, mobility, web services, supply chain management, demand planning, and customer-relationship management.
Karen plays nicely in the content strategy, information architecture, and interaction design sandboxes. She is Managing Partner at Bond Art + Science, a UX consultancy she founded in 2006, and formerly VP and National Lead for User Experience at Razorfish. She also teaches Design Management in the Interaction Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts. Her book, Content Strategy for Mobile, is published by A Book Apart.
Luke was Co-founder and Chief Product Officer (CPO) of Bagcheck which was acquired by Twitter Inc. just nine months after being launched publicly. Prior to this, Luke was an Entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital and the Chief Design Architect (VP) at Yahoo! Inc. where he worked on product alignment and forward-thinking integrated customer experiences on the Web, mobile, TV, and beyond.
James Macanufo is an independent designer, developer, and occasional management consultant. He believes visualization is essential to helping people make sense of their world and their work. Over the past ten years, he has helped big tech, government and startup clients unlock understanding and change through sketching and visual language, and he co-wrote Gamestorming to share some of “what works.” He spends his free time teaching, designing games, and fun workshops.
The son of a plumber and a psychologist, Dan feels the interaction design he does is a little bit of both. Since 1995, he’s designed everything from websites to consumer electronics to robots. He feels that design isn’t only about problem solving, but about creating a better, more humane, future. At Smart Design, Dan is one of the directors of the interaction design practice, leading and advising teams to create new interaction paradigms across a wide range of products, spanning both digital and physical.
Liz Danzico is co-founder and co-chair of the MFA in Interaction Design Program at the School of Visual Arts. She is independent consultant, working with businesses to explore the relationship audiences have with products/services. Recent projects have allowed her to work with The New York Times, This American Life, and The TED Prize.
Liz serves on the advisory boards for the Austin Center for Design, CreativeMornings, desigNYC, The Feast, and has been advisor for organizations from Union Square Ventures to the Rhode Island School of Design. She is current Editor-in-Chief of The Manual. Liz has the honor of lecturing widely.
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 a pioneer in Experience Design, Interaction Design and Information Design, speaks and teaches internationally, and is an accomplished entrepreneur. He holds an MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School and a BS in Industrial Design from Art Center College of Design. He worked with Richard Saul Wurman at TheUnderstandingBusiness and, later, co-founded vivid studios, a decade-old pioneering company in interactive media and one of the first Web services firms on the planet. Nathan is on the board of directors for Teague and the AIGA.
As an evangelist for design ethnography, Kelly Goto is dedicated to understanding how real people integrate products and services into their daily lives. Goto is principal of gotomedia, LLC, a global leader in research-driven, people-friendly interface design and strategy for web, mobile, and product solutions for clients including Samsung, Hyundai, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Adobe, and Seiko Epson Japan. Goto served as past president of the national board AIGA Center for Brand Experience. She currently lives in Half Moon Bay with her husband and two daughters.
Giles is author of Simple and usable web mobile and interaction design and Managing Director of UX design agency cxpartners. He’s actively involved in the UX community – as co-chair of IA Summit 2013 and formerly as President of the UK Usability Professionals’ Association. He has worked with British Standards Institute in developing guidance on web accessibility and is a popular speaker at conferences around the world.
Mags Hanley is an information architect and UX Manager living in the UK. Originally from Melbourne, she has worked across the world developing deep information architectures for content heavy web sites, while managing teams of User Experience professionals. She has worked from companies as diverse as Sensis and Telstra in Australia to Argus Associates in the US and BBC, Avenue A | Razorfish and Time Out in the UK.
As a manager she has lead teams from 3 to 50; developing team members to enhance their skills, creating a UX practice where there was none and leading the work within projects.
As the Director of User Experience at MailChimp, Aarron Walter socializes with primates and ponders ways to make interfaces more human. He lives with his wife and son in Athens, Georgia, and is a wannabe barista. He tweets about design under the moniker @aarron on Twitter.
Claire heads up service and UX design at AlertMe, the leading UK innovator in smart home services named Wired magazine’s top UK startup of 2012. She has worked in UX design and research for 15 years for companies such as Razorfish, Flow Interactive and Fjord.
Her key interest is in ubiquitous computing for the mundane objects and activities that make up our daily lives. The field of the internet of things is heavily technology driven, and we are just beginning to understand what humane design for mass market audiences might look like.
Bill Albert is Executive Director of the Design and Usability Center, and an adjunct professor in the graduate program in Human Factors in Information Design at Bentley University. His research interests include user experience strategy, qualitative and quantitative research methods, and the science that underlies user experience and design. He has been on the editorial board for the Journal of Usability Studies since 2009.
Aaron has nearly 15 years experience on the web and, in that time, has cultivated a love of web standards and an in-depth knowledge of website strategy and architecture, interface design, and numerous languages (including XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP). He is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Easy! Designs, a web development consultancy. He is also Group Manager of the Web Standards Project (WaSP).
Kevin M. Hoffman is an information architect and design strategist that has been building stuff with bits and pixels since 1995.
He has served as the Experience Director for the award-winning web design agency Happy Cog, and as the Director of Digital Communications for MICA, one of the top design schools in the world, where he also taught web design and information archtiecture in the BFA and MFA programs.
Jeff Gothelf has spent a 14 year career as an interaction designer, Agile practitioner, user experience team leader and blogger. He is one of the leading voices on the topic of Agile UX and Lean UX. In addition, Jeff is the author of the upcoming O’Reilly book (early 2013), Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business. Jeff has led cross-functional product design teams at TheLadders, Publicis Modem, WebTrends, Fidelity, and AOL while maintaining a strong advisory and mentorship presence in the startup communities of New York City and Silicon Valley. In 2012 he co-launched Proof, a product design and innovation studio that combines lean processes with strategy, design and technology which was acquired by New Context.
Oliver Reichenstein was born in 19971 in Basel, Switzerland. He learned programming as a computer kid in the early 80ies. After studying Philosophy in Basel and Paris, he started working as interactive brand consultant for Interbrand Zintzmeyer&Lux.
He moved to Japan in September 2003 and started iA Inc in 2005. iA has set new standards in interaction design with clients like DIE ZEIT, Tages-Anzeiger and Freitag and its best selling text editor called iA Writer.
Dr. Andy Polaine has been involved in interaction design since the early 90s and was co-founder of the award-winning new media group, Antirom, in London. He was a creative producer at Razorfish, UK and later Interactive Director at Animal Logic, Sydney. Andy was Senior Lecturer and Head of the School of Media Arts at The University of New South Wales, Sydney before moving to Germany and holds a PhD from the University of Technology, Sydney in which he examined the relationship between play and interactivity. He now divides his time between being a Lecturer and Researcher in Service Design at the Lucerne School of Art and Design in Switzerland and his work as a service/interaction design consultant and writer.
His personal site is Playpenand can be found on Twitter as @apolaine.
Sandra Fisher-Martins is a plain-language activist and entrepreneur. She founded Português Claro in 2007 to work with businesses and government agencies to simplify their communication and abolish “information apartheid” – the barrier created by overly complex language.
She brings together language, design and usability to help people make informed choices about their health, education, welfare, and civil rights. Her acclaimed TEDx Talk, The Right to Understand, showed how clarity is everybody’s business – yes, that means you too.
Dan is co-founder of Apogee, a design research & usability services company based in Hong Kong. He recently co-authored the book Global UX with Whitney Quesenbery, a collection of stories and distillation of insights from UX practitioners around the world.
He also co-wrote The Usability Kit with Gerry Gaffney, an implementation guide providing best practices and guidelines for UX design teams.