Bill Verplank

Bill Verplank is a human-factors engineer with a long career in design, research and education. As a fresh ME PhD from MIT he worked eight years at Xerox on the testing and refinement of what we now call the "desktop metaphor": bit-map graphics, keyboard and mouse, direct manipulation. For six years, he worked with Bill Moggridge at IDTwo and IDEO doing "interaction design" - bringing the insights from computers to the industrial design of medical instruments, GPS navigation, mobile phones, and new input devices (keyboards, track-balls, mice). From IDEO, he moved to Interval Research for 8 years of innovating design methods (observation, body-storming, scenarios, metaphors) and researching active force-feedback ("haptics").

He began teaching design and man-machine-systems as a graduate student at MIT and "visual thinking" and product design at Stanford in the '70s. Since then he has lectured regularly in human factors, user-interface design and most recently "new music controllers" at Stanford's CCRMA. In 2000, he joined the steering committee of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) in Italy and has consulted most recently with the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID). He co-authored ACM SIGCHI Curriculum Recommendations and, for seven years, taught popular tutorials on Graphical Interface Design and Sketching Scenarios. He is known for sketching as he talks.

Brenda Laurel

Brenda Laurel is a designer, researcher, teacher and writer. Since 1976, she has been a pioneer and entrepreneur in interactive media, human-computer interaction and human-centered design research. She serves as professor and chair of the Graduate Program in Design at California College of Arts. She chaired the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (2002-2006) and was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs (2005-2006).

Based on her research in gender and technology at Interval Research (1992-1996), she co-founded Purple Moon in 1996 to create interactive media for girls. In 1993 at the Banff Centre for the Arts she co- created and produced a virtual reality environment called Placeholder, demonstrating new applications of the medium in narrative engagement for multiple participants. She co- founded Telepresence Research in 1989 to conduct research and development in virtual reality and remote presence systems and applications. She has worked for computer and software companies including Atari, Apple and Activision. Her books include The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990), Computers as Theatre (1991), Utopian Entrepreneur (2001), and Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2004). She earned her BA (1972) from DePauw University and her MFA (1975) and PhD in Theatre (1986) from the Ohio State University.

Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling, author, journalist, editor, and critic, was born in 1954. Best known for his ten science fiction novels, he also writes short stories, book reviews, design criticism, opinion columns, and introductions for books ranging from Ernst Juenger to Jules Verne. His nonfiction works include THE HACKER CRACKDOWN: LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER (1992), TOMORROW NOW: ENVISIONING THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS (2003), and SHAPING THINGS (2005). He is a contributing editor of WIRED magazine and writes a weblog. During 2005, he was the "Visionary in Residence" at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In 2008 he was the Guest Curator for the Share Festival of Digital Art and Culture in Torino, Italy, and the Visionary in Residence at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.

He has appeared in ABC's Nightline, BBC's The Late Show, CBC's Morningside, on MTV and TechTV, and in Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Fortune, Nature, I.D., Metropolis, Technology Review, Der Spiegel, La Repubblica, and many other venues.

Erik Hersman

Erik is the co-founder of Ushahidi (which means "testimony" in Swahili), a web application created to map the reported incidents of violence happening during the post-election crisis in Kenya. Currently, he is working with a team of mostly-African programmers to continue development of this new free and open source platform that makes it easier to crowdsource crisis information and visualize data. Ushahidi has been used for disasters in Haiti and Chile, by media organizations such as Al Jazeera and the Washington Post, for election monitoring in India, Afghanistan, Namibia and Mexico, and for multiple other uses around the world.

Erik Hersman is also the founder of AfriGadget, a multi-author website that showcases stories of Africans solving everyday problems with little more than their creativity and ingenuity. Fascinated by micro-entrepreneurs, gadgets and improvisation, he is proving that technology is changing Africa - daily.

In early 2010, Erik helped launch the new iHub (innovation hub) in Nairobi. It's an open space for the technologists, investors, tech companies and hackers in Nairobi. This space is a tech community facility with a focus on young entrepreneurs, web and mobile phone programmers and designers. It is part open community workspace (co-working), part vector for investors and VCs and part incubator.

Raised in Sudan and Kenya, Erik brings unique energy and insight to the world of technology and innovation - bridging the gap between Africa and Silicon Valley. An avid blogger Erik writes two different technology blogs including: AfriGadget and WhiteAfrican. One dedicated to low-tech African ingenuity, and the other to high-tech mobile and web changes happening throughout Africa.

Jason Bruges

Jason Bruges and his award-winning multidisciplinary studio are focused on creating interactive digital spaces that excite, intrigue and perform. The studio is particularly well known for light based design, exploring interactivity with the public and the environment through the highly imaginative use of materials and technologies.

Jason Bruges Studio was created by Jason Bruges in 2001 and has since grown to around 16 people with backgrounds in Architecture, Lighting Design, Product Design, Interaction Design and Project Management to delivers iconic public realm artwork and design beautiful site specific, technologically advanced, historically sensitive solutions and augments the environment with awe inspiring beauty.

Jason Bruges believes that exploring interaction should be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. When Interaction is innately about conversation, it requires more than one participant, so the environment or interventions the studio creates require an audience, viewer, playmate, critic, or observer so a feedback or an observation make the work complete.

The Studio's projects typically respond to the environment they are situated within and exhibit a minimal environmental/ecological impact. The studio is continually progressing the development of sustainable art and design in relation to environmental science and technological innovation.

For more information on Jason Bruges Studio, please visit www.jasonbruges.com or email us at info@jasonbruges.com

Lisa Strausfeld

Lisa Strausfeld has been a partner in Pentagram's New York office since 2002. Her work lies at the intersection of physical and virtual space: where information structures and physical structures meet, and where the navigation of information and the navigation of buildings join in a single experience. She and her team specialize in digital information projects including the design of large-scale media installations, software prototypes and user interfaces, signage and websites for a broad range of civic, cultural and corporate clients including One Laptop per Child, GE, Litl, Bloomberg, Gallup, The New York Times, M.I.T., Brown University, the Museum of Arts and Design and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Strausfeld holds four patents relating to user interfaces and intelligent search and retrieval, and in 2006 she was named to the Senior Scientist program at the Gallup Organization. In addition to many awards and honors, Strausfeld was selected as one of Fast Company's "Masters of Design" in 2009 and received the National Design Award in the category of Interaction Design in 2010.

Strausfeld studied art history and computer science at Brown University and earned master's degrees in architecture from Harvard University and in media arts and sciences from M.I.T.

Richard Buchanan

Richard Buchanan is Professor of Design, Management, and Information Systems at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. Before joining the Weatherhead faculty in 2008, he served as Head of the School of Design from 1992 until 2002 and from 2002 until 2008 as Director of Doctoral Studies. While at Carnegie Mellon, he inaugurated Interaction Design programs at the Masters and doctoral level. He is well known for extending the application of design into new areas of theory and practice, writing and teaching as well as practicing with the concepts and methods of Interaction Design. He argues that interaction design does not stop at the flatland of the computer screen but extends into the personal and social life of human beings. In keeping with this, he has worked on the redesign of the Australian Taxation System, the restructuring of products and information for the United States Postal Service, and other consulting activities. At the Weatherhead, he has turned his work toward "collective interactions," focusing on problems of organizational change and a reform of management education around the concept of "managing by design." Buchanan is a widely published author and speaker. He is also Co-Editor of Design Issues, the international journal of design history, theory, and criticism published by the M.I.T. Press. He served for two terms as President of the Design Research Society, the learned society of the design research community. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and an honorary doctorate from the University of Montreal.