Contributor Biographies
S. Joy Mountford rebuilt the original Apple Human Interface Group to four times its size, building seminal products such as QTime, navigable movies. She is the founder of the university Design Expo, running for over 20 years. She originated interactive music projects over the Internet at Interval Research, alongside tangible musical products and books. She was Head of the Design Innovation Group at Yahoo and a VP of UXD, where she developed a showcase portfolio of data visualization projects helping explain large data sets. She speaks extensively on design thinking and how to use design effectively to innovate in corporations.
“Design to Engage” team members collaborated as graduate students at the IIT Institute of Design. Diego Bernardo (MDes, 2013) is now a design strategist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Maggee Bond (MDes, 2014) is a researcher at gravitytank, a design innovation firm based in Chicago, IL. Amanda Geppert (PhD candidate, 2016) is completing her doctoral degree exploring the democratization of codesign processes for civic capacity building. Alisa Weinstein (MDes, 2013) is senior design researcher at Uber Technologies in San Francisco, CA. Helen Wills (MDes, 2013) is a design research consultant working across product, service, and brand innovation in Atlanta, GA. Janice Wong (MDes and MBA, 2013) is a design and insights lead at Doblin in Toronto, ON.
Anne Schorr is the cofounder of Conifer Research, a Chicago-based ethnographic research firm that specializes in helping clients develop user-centered products, services, and business strategies. Anne has over 15 years of consulting experience helping clients gather and apply critical consumer insight. She has an enduring passion for research that has taken her around the globe to study topics as wide ranging as health practices in rural African villages to “smart” schools in Hong Kong.
Evan Hanover is the Director of Research at Conifer Research in Chicago, IL. There he is an anthropologist whose fascination with language drives a passion to understand the underlying meaning and value users impart to their lives and experiences. He also enthusiastically draws on his experience in improv theater to facilitate collaboration and bring user insights to life in client presentations and workshops. Outside the office, he plays the role of photographer for Chicago’s robust theater community for which his work has appeared in such publications as the Chicago Tribune, American Theater Magazine, and the New York Times.
Jaime Rivera is a PhD student at the IIT Institute of Design, where he is exploring the intersections of cognitive science, technology, and experience design with the purpose to facilitate positive behavior change. His research proposes a structured participatory approach using provotypes (prototypes to provoke) to study how people react when an uncommon experience challenges their established assumptions about how technology influences behavior.
Steve Sato is the founder of Sato + Partners, a management and organization development consulting firm specializing in developing experience design and innovation strategies and organizational capabilities. He has cultivated and built design capability at a Fortune 20 tech firm and has an additional more than 20 years of management consulting experience working with Fortune 500 companies and nonprofits to develop customer-centered strategies, operationalize the plans, and build required experience design capability. Steve has a Master’s in Design from the Institute of Design, Master of Engineering Management from Northwestern University, and a Bachelor’s of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois.
Janna C. Kimel’s 20 years in design and research has run the gamut from sitting at a sewing machine, sewing apparel and prototypes, to conducting qualitative research and strategizing the best way to integrate the voice of the customer. She has run her own consultancy, worked for Intel and Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield, and consulted with the likes of Ziba, IDEO, Microsoft, and Lunar. Motivation, behavior change, customer experience, and wearable technology are subjects she is passionate about, which means writing and presenting to share the gospel. She’s a ramblin’ wreck from Georgia Tech where she earned a Master’s degree in Industrial Design.
Steve Portigal helps companies to plan strategically for user research and to unlock their team’s research superpowers. He is principal of Portigal Consulting, author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, and host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast. He makes his home in the San Francisco Bay Area where there’s always a new ramen restaurant to check out.
Christopher Stapleton is the lead Creative Venture Catalyst at Simoisys Real World Laboratories, where he pursues the “art of innovation to enhance the human experience.” He applies his work in experience design innovation to transforming lives with the next generation of entertainment, education, training, commerce, and health services. His background working in film, television, computer graphics, and on Broadway has translated into designing and producing mega-theme parks for Universal, Disney, and Nickelodeon. His pioneering work with Mixed Reality as the Founding Research Director of the UCF Media Convergence laboratory has transformed into starting his own design research firm, Simiosys.com.
David McKenzie is currently the Design Fellow at The Ohio State University, investigating prototyping in the front end of participatory design research to explore user needs and future concerns. He studied Product Design at the University of Edinburgh before practicing as a designer/maker. He also spent several years working in Korea as an educator while continuing his practice before returning to academia to explore and contribute to the field of design research.