Bio

I am a Design Principle at IBM focusing on design for AI, running the worldwide design for AI guild. I am a masters graduate from the cool but short-lived Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy. Prior to entering graduate school I had 8 years of professional interactive design experience, including owning my own small company in TX and working for marchFIRST during the .com boom in San Francisco. Prior to grad school I was the Director of Information Architecture for the San Francisco office of marchFIRST, where I introduced user-centered design and developed the department and its methodology while doing work for clients like Sega, Visa, and Apple. After grad school I worked for the Strategic Prototyping team for Microsoft in Redmond, Washington for 18 months. I spent a decade at boutique interaction design agency Cooper, in various roles that included individual contributor, educator, Managing Director, and Design Fellow. Over my career I've worked with financial, medical, insurance, and startup clients around the world to evolve their software and services to better fit the goals of their users. I've taught hundreds of students and companies around the globe how to design from a user-centered, goal-directed point of view. I have evolved pair design practice from both a philosophical and practical perspective. I write books as well as articles for online magazines and blogs. In 2012 I co-authored a book about interaction design lessons from sci-fi. In 2014 I co-authored the 4th Edition of the interaction design tome About Face. In 2017 I published Designing Agentive Technologies: AI That Works for People. As a public speaker I have spoken around the world on topics as diverse as interaction design for artificial intelligence, interactive narrative, mobile tools for lifelong learners, information visualization, interaction design, the future of technology, randomness as a tool for innovation, and sci-fi interfaces.