Adam Connor

Applying Film Making Tools to Interaction Design

Adam Connor has spent nearly a decade in the User Experience Design world. As a Senior Experience Designer with Mad*Pow in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Adam combines his creative and technical backgrounds to design effective, efficient, and easy-to-use websites, applications, and interactive media.

Previously, Adam spent eight years as an in-house designer for a large financial services firm and six years as an independent UX Consultant. As an Experience Design instructor, he taught undergraduate students at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, focusing on research techniques, interaction design, information architecture, and usability.

Adam has spent the past year investigating what happens when his Computer Science and Film & Animation background are put to the test, thoroughly exploring the connection between film and User Experience Design. By studying how well-made films engage and captivate viewers, Adam then translates movies into UX Design terms with a filmmaker's eye to tell a story with design.

When he's not answering the question, "What do film and UX have in common?" Adam takes his design skills offline to his sketchpad and the piles of Legos he routinely transforms into movie scenes and other creations.

Ana Domb

Tacky and Proud: Brazil's Tecnobrega Audiences

Ana Domb Krauskopf does user experience and cultural research at THE MEME Design, she has also worked as a journalist, film and music producer and cereal mascot. Her work has always revolved around creativity and audiences. She recently obtained a Master of Science degree from the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT where she worked with the Convergence Culture Consortium. In 2007 she co-authored "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead: Creating Value in a Spreadable Marketplace" with Dr. Henry Jenkins and Xiaochang Li. Her Master's thesis was an ethnographic exploration into the symbolic currencies and the value of audience participation in Brazil's Tecnobrega. She's consulted for Turner Broadcasting and Comcast as well as working beside anthropologist Grant McCracken. In her native Costa Rica, she co-founded Cinergia, the first film production fund designed to stimulate media activity in Central America and Cuba. There, she also worked with the Papaya Music label where she co-produced the Papaya Fest, an eclectic large-scale Central American music festival. You can find Ana on twitter @anadk.

Austin Brown

Human-Centered-Design and the Intersection of the Physical and Digital Worlds

Austin joined EffectiveUI in 2010 as a User Experience Designer after graduating from the Savannah College of Art & Design with a BFA in Industrial Design. Prior to joining EffectiveUI, Austin had the opportunity to live and work in Hong Kong as an industrial design intern for VTech Communications, where he helped design consumer electronics devices for the European market. Austin's background in industrial design helps guide his eye for designing digital interactions and experiences for clients such as Microsoft.

Callie Neylan

Beautiful Interactions: Codifying Aesthetics In Interaction Design

Callie is an assistant professor of design at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Prior to her academic career, she worked as an interaction designer for renowned design firms and non-profits including Gensler, Teague, and NPR. She also served as adjunct faculty at the University of Washington and the Maryland Institute College of Art, teaching undergraduate and graduate level courses in design. Her work has been recognized by the AIGA and I.D. Magazine, and featured in the New York Times, Fast Company, and Gizmodo. She also served as a 2010 juror for the AIGAis prestigious 365 competition.

Callie's research interests include designing for the disabled and the intersection of interaction design and the urban space. She is also exploring the elements and definitions of beauty in interaction design.

She holds a BS from Central Washington University with concentrations in business and French, and an MFA in design from the University of Washington in Seattle. She is passionate about design in all its disciplines; technology; photography; fixed-gear bicycles; skiing; good, slow food; Weimaraners; and artisanal espresso.

Carl Alviani

What do you do, anyway? - Describing IxD to the Outside World

Carl Alviani is a writer and content strategist for Ziba, a design consultancy in Portland, Oregon. He began writing about design in 2004 as an occasional contributor to Core77.com while working as a freelance industrial designer in New York City. After switching to full time writing and editing in 2007, he served as the editorial director of Coroflot.com, a design employment and portfolio site, and a contributing editor at Core77, where he penned over 500 articles and blog posts on topics ranging from CAD to portfolio strategy to the use of iPhones in user research, and worked with dozens of leading designers and educators to help bring their stories to the public. He also co-organized and moderated the 2009 Creative Confab panel discussion series on creative employment, in four different cities.

He earned his BS in Structural Engineering from UC San Diego and Masters in Industrial Design from the Pratt Institute, and served in the US Peace Corps as a science teacher before turning to design. He lives in northeast Portland, where he rides his bike a lot and hangs out with the local IDSA and IxDA community nearly every week.

Carl DiSalvo

growBot Garden: The Co-Design of Alternative Agricultures

Carl DiSalvo received a Ph.D. in Design from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006. From 2006 - 2007 he was a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University with joint appointments in the Studio for Creative Inquiry and the Center for the Arts in Society. Since 2007 he has been an assistant professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech he runs The Public Design Workshop, a design research studio that investigates the possible roles of design in shaping and enabling public discourse and action. His research and practice spans the fields of interaction design, participatory design, science and technology studies, and human-computer interaction. Current themes in his work include design and the construction of publics, political design, and speculative design. Since early 2010 he has been working on the growBot Garden project, which explores how robotics and sensing technologies might be used to support local small-scale agriculture.

Charles Hannon

The Neuroscience of Usability

Charles Hannon is professor and founding chair of the Information Technology Leadership department at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, PA. He teaches courses in human computer interaction, data presentation, project management, and the history of information technology, among others. He is the author of Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture (2005). More recently, he has written on the intersection of humans and technology in interactions, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Educause Quarterly, and other publications.

Cheryl Platz

Computer Engineer Barbie: How Interaction Design can entice a new generation of women

Cheryl Platz is a User Experience Designer with Microsoft, currently working with the Management & Administration Experience team on advanced user interfaces for information technology professionals. Prior to her time at Microsoft, Cheryl spent a number of years as a Producer in the video game industry. Her shipped titles include Disney Friends (Nintendo DS) and numerous titles in the Sims line of products including The Sims Bustin' Out, The Urbz, and The Sims 2. She also assisted Walt Disney Imagineering with early prototypes for Disney's Photopass system for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts.

When she isn't working, Cheryl is very active in the Seattle theatre community. She is an ensemble member with Unexpected Productions, home of Seattle Theatresports improv comedy, and performs in their flagship show on a near-weekly basis. Improv has proved a great inspiration for her daytime work, and Cheryl is helping to lead an effort to teach improvisational skills to women engineers at Microsoft. Cheryl is also a passionate volunteer for local efforts to expose young women in technology, including the IGNITE program in Seattle.

Cheryl graduated from Carnegie Mellon University (2002) with a BS in Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction, and spent an additional year in CMU's Entertainment Technology Center graduate program.

Cindy Chastain

Redefining Personalization as Real-time Conversation

Cindy Chastain is an experience designer, strategist, teacher and screenwriter. As a Creative Director at R/GA, named Digital Agency of the Decade by Adweek, Cindy leads with a focus on user-centered design, storytelling, and collaboration. She’s also bent on changing the way traditional advertisers and marketers think about customer experiences. Clients she's worked with range from Verizon to BBC Worldwide, Showtime, GSK, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Pfizer, Madison Square Garden and Fuse.

In addition to moonlighting as an adjunct professor of interaction design, she is planning a book about how storytelling techniques can be used a framework for design. She holds an MFA in screenwriting from Columbia University and earned a BS in Radio, TV, Film from Northwestern University. In her spare time, she can be found hanging out with her 6-year-old Harry Potter fanatic, and attempting to play her somewhat new ukulele.

Dave Cronin

Healthcare interfaces: How interaction design can help fix medicine

Dave is the Director of Interaction Design at Smart Design in San Francisco where he works with design teams and clients to understand, imagine, strategize, design and create all sorts of digital products, and experiences. He's enjoyed working on everything from the kiosks and handheld guides at the Getty Center to computer-assisted surgery, and has a particular passion for medical- and health-related projects. Dave was a coauthor of About Face 3, and previously a Managing Director at Cooper. Find him on twitter at @davcron.

Debra Levin Gelman

Designing Immersive Online Environments for Kids

Deb Gelman has been involved with kids and media since 1993. After earning bachelors' degrees in visual media and psychology from American University in Washington, DC, Deb worked in childrenis television, creating educational programming for elementary-school kids. She moved into interactive media in the late 90s, studying information design and technology at Georgia Tech. Her masters' thesis, and subsequent work, focused on using immersive online iworldsi to teach kids about environmental science.

Since that time, Deb has been designing kids websites, software, and virtual environments for companies including Crayola, PBS Sprout, Scholastic, The Campbellis Soup Company, and Comcast. Her most recent virtual worlds project was the award-winning Planet Orange, an initiative of ING Direct designed to teach 1-6th graders financial literacy. Deb currently works at Comcast Interactive Media in Philadelphia, PA.

Ethan Eismann

Photoshop.com 2.0 - the making of an experience ecosystem

Ethan Eismann is a Sr. Experience Design Manager at Adobe Systems. His teams work on projects that make it easier for professional designers to create interactive digital experiences, faster.

In the recent past, Ethan led the design of Adobe Flash Catalyst, the newest tool to be added to the Adobe Creative Suite. With Flash Catalyst, Ethan crafted a product vision that makes it easy for designers to prototype rich interactive experiences, without needing to code. Before that, Ethan worked closely with the Adobe AIR team to develop best design practices for the emerging Adobe AIR platform. He has designed experiences for mobile devices, RIAs, and desktop applications such as Creative Suite 4, and Adobe Acrobat.

Prior to Adobe, Ethan worked at a number of start-ups, and attended the UC Berkeley iSchool When he has time away from making good design happen, he writes about it at: eismann-sf.com/news.

Geoff Dowd

Photoshop.com 2.0 - the making of an experience ecosystem

Geoff Dowd involves himself in the intersection of useful interactive design and digital entertainment.

With Adobe XD in San Francisco, Geoff has recently led the design of Photoshop.com – an immersive destination site created for digital photographers and image editing enthusiasts. Since the launch of Photoshop.com, he has turned his focus to extend Adobe’s digital imaging legacy into the realm of touch and tablet based devices.

Prior to joining Adobe, Geoff was Associate Creative Director at Odopod in San Francisco, where he led teams to design and produce award winning entertainment interfaces for MTV, Nike, Zune, Honda and more. As part of his professional career, Geoff has grown up through the ranks of Adobe, Odopod, Macromedia, Frog Design, Sapient and various start-ups. Classically trained as a Graphic Designer at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, he turned away from print the first chance he got during his first job at Studio Archetype.

Jimmy Chandler

Accessibility is Not a Checklist

Jimmy Chandler has been working with clients and colleagues to create Web sites and applications with great user experiences for over 13 years. Active in the Washington, DC area UX community, Jimmy is a frequent attendee, volunteer, organizer, and speaker for Accessibility DC, IXDA DC, and other UX-related events.

Jimmy's experience in accessibility dates to 2001, before the U.S. Section 508 regulations went into effect. This experience includes training project managers, designers, developers, and testers in accessibility, web design, and user experience methods, as well as conducting numerous accessibility assessments, remediation of accessibility barriers, and conducting research with users of assistive technology as participants.

Jimmy's online experience began by writing a column and moderating discussion forums on U.S. current events. More recently, he managed a team of Web professionals for a Fortune 500(R) government contractor for five years. In between, he worked as a designer/developer, usability specialist, project manager, online recruiting coordinator, writer, editor, and accessibility analyst. Currently, Jimmy is a Senior Information Architect with Sapient Government Services.

Jimmy has a B.A. in Government from the College of William and Mary and currently lives in Arlington, Virginia with his wife @coolacctngchick (aka Nicole).

Josh Clark

Up with Complexity! Challenging Users for Fun and Profit

Josh Clark is a designer, developer, and author specializing in mobile design strategy and user experience. He's author of the O'Reilly books "Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps" and "Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders." Josh's outfit Global Moxie offers workshops and consulting services to help creative companies build tapworthy iPhone apps and effective websites.

Kalani Kordus

Macro vs. Micro

Kalani Kordus is the Chief Creative Officer for smudgeproof, a design & development firm specializing in multi-touch and mobile software. smudgeproof has helped premium brands and Fortune 500 companies create compelling user experiences for millions of people. Prior to smudgeproof, he was a Product Design Architect for Yahoo's Mail and Messenger products, helping them bring Yahoo Messenger for Vista/iPhone/Android and Yahoo Mail for Android to market. While he was at frog design he worked with many major brands, including HP, Alltel and Yahoo!

In his leisure time he experiments with sound at various frequencies in various time intervals with various sound generators. The results of these experiments have been known to materialize on the web...on occasion.

Kaleem Khan

Design for Evil: Ethical Design

Kaleem is a founding partner of strategy and design research consultancy True Insight, based in Toronto. As a strategist, consultant and researcher, Kaleem helps global companies, agencies, startups and governments create great experiences and solve complex problems. Over two decades, he has worked with clients that include leaders in consumer electronics, mobile technology, Internet services, software, health care, financial services, telecom and security. That experience has informed his perspective on ethical challenges in the interaction design field. He is an industry advisor to Ryerson University, OCAD University sLab and the Mobile Experience + Design conference. Kaleem runs the UX Book Club Toronto; leads the UX Irregulars, the largest user experience design professionals' group in Canada; and co-founded the InteractionCamp unconference. Kaleem is an active member of professional user experience design groups that include ACM SIGCHI, the IAI and the IxDA. http://twitter.com/kaleemux

Karl Adam

Macro vs. Micro

Karl Adam is the Chief Technical Officer for smudgeproof, a design & development firm specializing in multi-touch and mobile software. smudgeproof has helped premium brands and Fortune 500 companies create compelling user experiences for millions of people. Prior to smudgeproof, he was a Senior Software Engineer for Yahoo's Messenger product, helping them bring Yahoo Messenger for Mac and iPhone to market.

Karl is a contributor to the open source community. He founded the Growl notification system project and is also the author of MPOAuthConnection, a drop in cocoa component for Mac and iPhone apps to talk to OAuth web services.

Lindsay Moore

Human-Centered-Design and the Intersection of the Physical and Digital Worlds

Lindsay is a User Experience Architect at EffectiveUI where she specializes in user-centered design practices, helping clients such as Rosetta Stone and Sports Authority solve complex data and usability challenges for Web, mobile and desktop applications. Her background is in Liberal and Fine Arts, but she became designer after figuring out that it was much more interesting to solve creative problems for people other than herself. Lindsay is interested in the way people interact with objects, systems, society and the environment, and strives to create experiences that help people better understand the information surrounding them, communicate with one another, and most importantly, thrive in a technology-heavy world.

Lindsay holds two Bachelor's degrees in Fine Art from New College of Florida and the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design. When sheis not looking for ways to make user experience more effective, more rewarding and more human, she spends her time playing bass in a local band, cheering on the Denver Nuggets and practicing yoga.

Megan Grocki

Marketing is not a 4 letter word

Sassy, smiling and straightforward, Megan directs experience design at Mad*Pow while simultaneously heading up all of its marketing activities.With 15 years of experience in marketing and experience design, Megan is the ultimate user advocate. She specializes in helping clients discover the attitudes, intents and behaviors of their users and to understand what is truly important to them. By facilitating a user-centered design process, she is able to recognize various emotional mindsets and translate their desires into her designs, improving the presentation of information in a way that rings true with the audience and meets business goals.

She also directs all of Mad*Pow's marketing efforts, including overseeing marketing strategy and publicity, directing community engagement activities and managing Mad*Pow's presence at industry events.

Prior to Mad*Pow, Megan served as marketing manager with Momenta, and as senior product manager and user interface manager at Bottomline Technologies. Megan holds a BA from the University of New Hampshire, and is an active member of Girls-In-Tech Boston and MITX. She is a founding member of the NHUPA. Her speaking opportunities have included Refresh Boston, the 2010 IA Summit in Phoenix, the Usability Professionals' Association International conference in Munich and UPA Boston. A die-hard Red Sox fan, Megan can be found travelling the world, parked in her favorite beach chair, or walking around town with her husband and two young children.

Michael Meyer

Design Imperatives from the Roman Empire to the Nasa Space program and Beyond

Naval Nuclear Engineer, pilot, historian, design artisan, business strategist, storyteller, and educator -- Michael Meyer leads executives and their organizations through the complex and challenging conversations of discovery that are critical to success during times of massive change. He draws on his frontline leadership experience to integrate and evolve a unique understanding that marries the business imperative with design awareness.

Michael comes to Adaptive Path from frog design, where he led the company's California studio as General Manager, overseeing the firm's physical and digital product design offering. Previously, he started and led the Product Strategy practice at IDEO's Boston office.

Not only has Meyer spearheaded tremendous operational achievements, combining frog's Palo Alto and San Francisco offices into a single group, he's also led a wide range of projects: planning a new line of home electrical devices, crafting the vision and expressing the value proposition for a major pharmaceutical company's internet presence, developing a next-generation electronic payment token, and leading the cockpit and cabin design of a new jet aircraft. Meyer's project teams have won two gold and two silver IDEA awards for their work.

Before Meyer's move to product development consulting, he served as a Lieutenant in the US Navy, running a Naval telecommunications facility in Naples, Italy as General Manager. Prior to that, he managed the production and testing of shipboard nuclear power plants as a Navy engineering officer.

Meyer has a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley; an MBA from Harvard Business School, appointed as a Fellow of the Batten Institute, Darden GSBA, University of Virginia, where he has taught early-stage innovation and product development. He currently instructs at the Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego.

Mike Kruzeniski

Personal, Relevant, Connected: Designing Integrated Mobile Experiences for Apps and Web

Mike Kruzeniski is a Creative Director in the Windows Phone design studio, leading the Windows Phone App team.

During his first two years at Microsoft, he worked on bringing the Windows Phone KIN mobile experience from concept to reality. Before joining Microsoft, Mike worked for Nokia Design's Insight + Innovation team, based in Los Angeles. The role of the I+I team in Nokia was to develop next generation product lines for Nokia Design, to incubate new product and business ideas for Nokia Corporate, and, to challenge the ideas of both Nokia Design and Corporate by visualizing completely new directions for the company.

Mike has a Master's degree in Interaction Design from the Umea Institute of Design in Sweden, and a Bachelor of Industrial Design from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada. He speaks and tutors regularly about Design and Experience at conferences and schools. The focus of his career has been to combine his diverse background in design with his interests in business, brand, culture, technology, mobility, play, and simplicity, to build engaging and seamless product experiences.

Nick Myers

The visual interface is now your brand

Nick Myers is the managing director of visual design and branding at Cooper where he works with teams to design experiences across a variety of digital products and services. He helps companies craft interfaces and brands that are both unique and compelling, yet authentic and usable. During his time at Cooper, he has focused on the design of iPad collaboration tools, portfolio management, in-home patient care, 3D interior design, photo sharing, virtualization, medical informatics, and even check fraud. He is an instructor for Cooper's visual interface design class and he writes often for the Cooper Journal. His designs have received several awards since he began working as a designer in 1996. When not designing, he's usually training for his next marathon. You can follow him on Twitter at @nickmyer5

Nina Walia

Pass it Back! Kid Apps on Grown Up Devices

Nina Walia has overseen interaction design and content development of websites and games for the Webby-award winning pbskids.org since 2004.

Committed to making a positive impact on the lives of children through curriculum-based games, she has worked with educational television producers on a variety of award-winning program sites, such as Curious George and The Jim Henson Companyis Sid the Science Kid. Her current focus is creating compelling gaming experiences that span multiple screens, including mobile devices and interactive whiteboards. Before coming to PBS, she earned a MS in Information Design and Technology from Georgia Tech where she examined how handheld computers can be used effectively by middle-school science students, sound designed responsive media spaces, and created shisha:: a digital mirror to reflect collective identity exploration and contextualize online community discussion. Twitter: @missmodular

Paris Buttfield-Addison

Making mistakes fun: Game mechanics are not a panacea, but they are kinda useful!

Paris wears many hats: co-founder of Secret Lab (a mobile game development startup), co-author of 'iPhone and iPad Game Development for Dummies' and 'Unity Mobile Game Development for Dummies' (out in 2011) and Product Manager (Mobile) at Meebo Inc., one of the Web's fastest growing consumer Internet companies. Paris has degrees in HCI, computer science, medieval and modern history and enjoys designing, producing and building awesome experiences for mobile. Through some miracle of time management, he is also a Graduate Researcher in information management at the University of Tasmania in Australia.

Peter Knocke

Consume Consume Consume

Peter Knocke is an Interaction Designer / Business Strategist / Obsessive Foodie. From growing up in a quiet Midwestern farm town to hopping around the globe, he has always closely observed how people live, work, and interact with each other. After studying business in the United States and design in Italy, he spends his days building web sites, mobile platforms, interactive installations and strategic roadmaps. Currently, he has dedicated his life to writing, speaking, and designing for projects that encourage a better balance of friends, family, life, and work.

When he's not designing, he can be found singing karaoke, dancing tango, and drinking whiskey. He currently resides in Manhattan and can be found at Jo's every Sunday night.

Peter Stahl

The Rhythm of Interaction

Peter Stahl is a senior interaction designer at Cisco, where he works on design standards. A longtime denizen of Silicon Valley, he has created user experiences for eBay, America Online, Microsoft, Netscape, Entrust, among others, for applications as diverse as e-commerce, system management, online conferencing, gesture-based pen computing, 3D social environments and desktop productivity. While at eBay, he led development of a library of design patterns, for which he and Josh Damon Williams of Hot Studio pioneered a new methodology for Interaction Audits, which they presented at IA Summit and Web 2.0 Expo. Peter also led eBayis notorious Pattern Optimization Squad (POPS) that approves design patterns, and was impresario of the Polynesian-themed Page Parsing Parties, where designs are deconstructed into their constituent components.

When he's not working, Peter can often be found tooting his oboe and English horn in Redwood Symphony, an ambitious Bay Area community orchestra. He also publishes his recommendations on California ballot propositions at peterates.com. He holds a degree in music theory and composition from Harvard.

Scott Stroud

Leaning Back With NPR: How We Created A Relaxing Experience For The iPad

Scott Stroud is a Senior User Experience Architect at NPR, specializing in application user interface design, news design, and usability engineering. He designed the user experience for many of NPR's Digital Media products, including the NPR for iPad app, the NPR Music iPhone app, the NPR Election 2008 map, the NPR web site , and the NPR Music web site . He is a Certified Usability Analyst (CUA) and a Project Management Professional (PMP) with over 15 years of experience in user-centered design and project management. Prior to joining NPR, Scott was a technology consultant for Idea Integration, where he designed software for government and commercial clients, including: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), U.S. Treasury Tax and Trade Bureau, and the Center for Organizational Excellence . He has a bachelor's degree in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia. He is currently studying to become a registered yoga teacher.

Scott Geoffrey Newson

Fun with non-digital solutions

Scott Newson has worked with: farmers, engineers, artists, programmers, geologists, students, and soccer-playing-children. Working with the MyHomeYourHome: Tiny House Project, he got to question how life can be lived with limited residential square-footage and, at the same time, learn how difficult it is to grow a vibrant community around a wiki. At the student-run cafe at university he chopped veggies so well that he was promoted to develop and run the bulk ordering system, in the process experiencing the trails and tribulations that come with providing healthy food to stressed and time-starved students. He recently went to Scotland for the summer to write code for a geology company, and got to experience the wonders of the widespread and well-used train network in the UK.

He is studying Computer Science, Psychology, Linguistics, and Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, and will be graduating in the next year. He generally works at the interface between software developers and specific users, having learnt geology, food preparation and basic construction to speak with end users in their own terms. Currently he is working in the other direction and preparing a paper for publication that applies an understanding of ecological evolution to the development of search algorithms in computer science.

Stephen Anderson

Long After the Thrill: Sustaining Passionate Users

Stephen P. Anderson is a speaker and consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He spends unhealthy amounts of time thinking about design, psychology and leading intrapreneurial teams-- topics he frequently speaks about at national and international events.

Stephen recently published the Mental Notes card deck (www.getmentalnotes.com), a tool to help businesses use psychology to design better experiences. Heis also writing a book on "Seductive Interactions" that will explore 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. Heis designed Web applications for businesses such as Nokia, Frito-Lay, Sabre Travel Network, and Chesapeake Energy as well as a number of smaller technology startups.

Stephen likes to believe that someday he'll have the time to start blogging again at poetpainter.com

Steven Johnson

Introducing IA, ID and UX into New Media Pedagogy, Journalism and Content Publishing

Steven Johnson was an editor and senior online producer at the Los Angeles Times for 7 years before joining Disney Online in 2007. For 5 years he has taught as an adjunct in the M.A. journalism program at USC's Annenberg School of Communications, where a fundamental shift is underway in the program's new media curriculum.

Susan Wyche

Design for the Developing World

Susan Wyche is a Computing Innovation Fellow at Virginia Tech's Center for Human-Computer Interaction. Her research focuses on human-computer interaction, design and cultural studies of technology. In her dissertation, Wyche used religion as a lens to understand how alternative worldviews can inform design. She has explored how Muslims in Atlanta, Charismatic Pentecostals in Sao Paulo, and Protestant Christians in Nairobi, use mobile phones, computers, and the Internet to support their religious practices. Each study has resulted in a publication at top-tier conference in her field, multiple design concepts, and in one case, a mobile phone application available for download at Apple Inc.'s "App Store."

Prior to coming to VaTech, Wyche received her PhD in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology, her master's degree from Cornell University and her undergraduate degree in Industrial Design from Carnegie Mellon University. In addition to her academic pursuits, Wyche has professional design experience, most notably working at Libbey Inc. designing glassware and as a design researcher for S.C. Johnson Inc.

Tim Wood

Scandalous Interaction

Tim Wood is currently Director of User Experience at EffectiveUI, an award-winning user experience agency that specializes in the creation and implementation of custom Web, mobile, desktop and touch-enabled applications. Prior to joining EffectiveUI, Tim was Creative Director for Design Innovation and Advanced Development at Eastman Kodak, where he received international recognition for creativity and design excellence.

For more than a decade, Tim has persistently focused on the radical transformation of business through user experience. From next-generation Web services to consumer electronics, his passion for design has fueled an inherent desire to innovate and promote progressive methods of interaction design.