Jacob Simons speaking at DRC X 2011.

Tom MacTavish is an assistant professor at the IIT Institute of Design and teaches courses related to interaction design history, theory, and practice. He holds master’s degrees in library and information science from University of Michigan and in English from University of Iowa, with a bachelor’s degree in English from Central Michigan University.

For nine years before coming to ID, he directed Motorola Labs’ Center for Human Interaction Research with research laboratories in Phoenix (AZ), Schaumburg (IL), and Shanghai (China). In prior years, he led the Human Interface Technology Center based in Atlanta (GA) for NCR Corporation and served as director of engineering for NCR’s wireless communications and networking engineering group in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

As a member of the human/computer interaction research community, Tom has participated in the full range of product conceptualization and development phases including strategy formulation, user and technology research, concept development, and product implementation. These activities resulted in delivered projects and products using many methods and technologies including recognition technologies (handwriting, speech, and image), interaction technologies (synthetic speech, multimodal interaction, and context aware systems) and experience design and prototyping (design research, user centered design, usability evaluations, and rapid prototyping).

Tom has maintained strong ties to university research throughout his career and has served as corporate liaison and advisor to The Georgia Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, and The Korean Advanced Institute for Science and Technology.

Charles Adler is an entrepreneur with more than 14 years experience in interaction design. Formerly director of strategy and information architecture at Agency.com, his work in user experience and design is driven by a commitment to create work for people in the simplest and cleanest way possible. Previously, he cofounded Subsystence, an online art publication, and Source-ID, an independent interaction design studio.

Bruce Nussbaum, former assistant managing editor and editorial page editor for BusinessWeek, is professor of innovation and design at Parsons The New School of Design. Nussbaum launched BusinessWeek’s coverage of the annual Industrial Designers Excellence Awards, the BusinessWeek/Architectural Record Awards for architecture, The Most Innovative Companies annual survey, and the S&P/BusinessWeek Global Innovation trading index. He is founder of the NussbaumOnDesign blog; the Innovation & Design online channel; IN: Inside Innovation, a quarterly innovation magazine; and Meet the Innovation Guru, a web show. He currently tweets and blogs on HBR.org and Fast Company.com about innovation and creativity. Nussbaum’s next book, CQ: Creative Intelligence, will be published by HarperCollins in the fall of 2012. In 2005, he was given the John F. Nolan Award by the Design Management Institute and I.D. magazine named Nussbaum as one of the 40 most influential people in design. In 2008, he was a finalist in the annual Design Mind Award given by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. In 2009, he was one of 50 design thinkers featured in the book Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life And Maybe Even The World, by Warren Berger. In 2010, Nussbaum was featured in Designing Media, by IDEO co-founder and Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum director Bill Moggridge, as one of the 37 most influential designers of media.

Amidst the plethora of recording and prototyping tools available to designers today, hand-sketching still remains one of the most valuable. However, many designers and researchers continue to lack the confidence required to use sketching as a means of capturing, evaluating and sharing information within a team environment. This workshop will focus on building participants confidence in rapidly visualizing ideas by keeping sketches simple and free of too much detail as participants practice a series of activities and drawing “hacks” aimed at translating abstract observations from research data into concrete and self contained narratives.

with Greg Ames and Joel Kashuba, Procter & Gamble

Design Research has historically focused on the elicitation of insights of people, cultures, things and context i.e., research execution. But what happens to all the revelation in those moments? And how do you pass “meaning” along to others to inspire them? Research is expensive (money, time and effort), and the speed of innovation now demands that more actionable insight be gleaned and “codified” and deployed quickly. But capture, synthesis and translation destroys meaning (e.g., “one pager”, 4×4, power point, even experiential displays or stories). Indeed, synthesis has a highly entropic consequence.

Inevitably the same research, same insights and same ideas come around and around and around, over and over and over. This not only wastes precious resources, it kills the creative soul (“I’ve been working on this for 6 months and just found out that we did this project 2 years ago!”).

Technology is a double edge sword in the battle to capture, relay and remember meaning. Content storage, access and knowledge interfaces help, but ultimately the problem of retaining, relaying and building upon the deepest original meaning is a matter of institutional culture, skills and behaviors.

In the Groundhog Day workshop, we will present a model and propose “the brief”, the design challenge and success criteria for technology, institutional and cultural dimensions…

And together, we will prototype solutions.

Greg has served a variety of innovation roles in a 27-year career at Procter & Gamble.  Originally trained in chemical engineering (Purdue), he dabbled in nursing, and then in mid-career he received training in industrial design (UC DAAP). Greg went on to design and develop various market products globally, such as Duncan Hines, Crest, Iams, Swiffer, Cascade, and Pampers.  He is currently principal industrial designer at P&G and supports various strategic innovation initiatives and core capability programs. At present, Greg is developing integrated design thinking / RD innovation curricula to scale best practice globally.  Greg also enjoys teaching applied narrative at IIT Institute of Design.

Greg is passionate about conveying the truth of the human experience so that innovators can remember and act upon these deep insights.  As engineer and designer, this passion converges into disciplines and methods that help capture and translate the authenticity of “meaning” from original research so the design, development, and commercialization systems of the company can truly understand and act upon these truths.

When he’s not working, Greg enjoys his wife, three children, and a bunch of pets. When he’s not doing that, he loves to be out in his workshop doing anything with wood, glass, ceramics, or treasures he finds walking along the railroad tracks.

Joel Kashuba is a Principal of Innovation Design for P&G’s Beauty & Grooming Group. He has spent much of the last decade driving initiatives and building business with a focus on authenticity and consumer delight through design.

Joel has been a regular speaker on the industrial design circuit, at IDSA and AGIA meetings, and is noted for his playful approach to presentation that often blurs the lines between serious work and theater. Design Research has been a specialty for Joel within his work at P&G, having created and led creative consumer research around the globe and across billion of dollars worth of business.

He lives in Cincinnati with his beautiful wife, a large library, good music collection, and giant bear-sized dog.

Ken Kellogg is a product research professional with 14 years of experience in the online/e-commerce space. During his career, Ken has had roles ranging from individual contributor as a technical writer to director of a full-service product research team. As the senior director of user research at Marriott International, Ken leads a team of qualitative and quantitative researchers whose main goal is the redesign of Marriott.com, a $6.5 billion transactional website. As such, the research team’s key directive is to drive more online revenue for Marriott while at the same time doing no harm to highly engaged Marriott guests.

Before joining Marriott, Ken was a senior manager of market research at AOL where he was responsible for the day-to-day operation of three usability labs. During his tenure at AOL, he contributed to five AOL client launches, AIM, Moviephone, and Mapquest as well as partners such as Amazon, Netflix, CNN, and Overstock.com.

Ken has a master’s degree in technical communication from SPSU and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from William Jewell College.

Luke Williams is an internationally recognized authority on innovation leadership. He is a fellow at frog, one of the world’s most influential innovation companies, and professor of innovation at NYU’s Stern School of Business. He has worked with industry leaders like American Express, GE, Sony, Crocs, Virgin, Disney, and Hewlett-Packard to create breakthrough product, service, and business model solutions. Williams has been invited to speak worldwide, and his views have been featured in BusinessWeek, Fast Company, The Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business (FT Press, 2011).

Donna Flynn recently joined Steelcase Inc. as director of design research for WorkSpace Futures. She came to Steelcase after 8.5 years at Microsoft Corporation, where she was influential in introducing and embedding design research practices into a legacy usability culture. She held a number of user experience design and research leadership roles at Microsoft, including establishing a new practice in the emergent Health Solutions Group, leading consumer strategy research across multiple businesses in the Interactive Entertainment Group, and leading the mobile communications research and strategy team. This year Donna also co-chaired the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC2011) in Boulder, Colorado.

Donna received her Ph.D. in anthropology at Northwestern University in 1997; as a Fulbright scholar, she investigated impacts of the globalizing economy on cross-border trade movements, smuggling, and work practices in West African borderland communities. She then went on to work in applied research in international development and microfinance, leading projects at the International Center for Research on Women, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the World Bank. Prior to joining Microsoft, Donna was a senior manager of user experience for Sapient Corporation in San Francisco, where she worked with technology and telecommunications clients including Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, and Sprint.

Donna is passionate about insight-driven design strategy across all levels of business, from future-thinking opportunity exploration to product design to customer engagement and relationship development. She also brings extensive international experience across Europe, Asia, and Africa in areas of design research, business strategy, and globalization trends. When she’s not working, Donna spends her time enjoying the outdoors with her husband and 8-year-old daughter in Colorado, Alaska, and various far-flung cities or sea kayaking locations around the world.