Speakers

Steve Baty Principal, Meld Studios

Steve likes to understand how complex systems behave, and redesign them to improve the outcomes for the individuals and organisations operating within.

He is a Principal of Meld Studios, an award-winning Australian design studio. Steve has over 18 years of commercial experience working with major Australian and international brands on strategy and design, including Westpac, Qantas, Telstra, oneworld, AMP, RMIT University, State Library of Victoria, Dome Coffees and Suncorp.

Steve sits on the Good Design Council of Australia. He is the founder of UX Book Club; co-Chairs Australia’s UX Australia conference; and served as Chair of Interaction|12 – the annual conference of the IxDA for 2012. In 2012-2015 Steve served on the Judging Panel for the Good Design Awards, and judged Interaction Awards in 2012. Until recently he served as President of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), and sat on the IxDA Board of Directors from 2009-2014.

Steve is speaking as part of our Politics of Innovation theme.

Ted Booth Senior Director of UX, Honeywell

Ted Booth is senior director of Honeywell’s User Experience (HUE) worldwide initiative, with a focus on Honeywell Connected Home (HCH) and its line of products and services. For more than 125 years, Honeywell’s heritage of helping people feel comfortable and secure has been matched by reliability and trust in the brand.

Ted believes the connected home will only succeed if it’s a place people want to live. If it’s only about a technology trend (apps), or a particular design style (modern), it will fail. It has to be more broadly accessible, bring tangible value, and inevitably blend into the fabric of everyday life. Ultimately, the connected home experience needs to come across as simplistic, accessible and able to drive comfort and peace of mind.

Based in Brooklyn, NY, Ted works with HUE Design Studios to develop and facilitate seamless, engaging end-to-end experiences and design elements into Honeywell’s Connected Home products and platform including Lyric, Total Connect, and other ecosystems.

He previously was principal and managing director at Method, an international experience design firm, as well as interaction design director at the consulting firm, Smart Design. Ted also was a senior design manager at Motorola Enterprise Mobility. Ted has a Masters of Human-Centered Communication Design from Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, and a BA in Hispanic Studies and International Affairs from Lewis and Clark College.

Ted is leading the How to Succeed when Everyone is Your User theme.

MJ Broadbent Design Director, GE Digital

At GE Digital, the world’s premier digital industrial company, MJ leads an experience design team who envision and create software solutions that connect people, data and machines via Predix, GE’s Industrial Internet platform. MJ’s expertise and pragmatic design leadership over the past 20 years has benefited clients including Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The College Board, Johnson & Johnson, The McGraw-Hill Companies (including Standard & Poor’s), Pfizer, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Sony Electronics, and the United Nations, among others.

MJ is also a leader for IxDA (Interaction Design Association): From 2008-2010 she spearheaded local events programming in New York City, then co-chaired the Interaction11 conference, thereafter serving on the Board of Directors as Treasurer from 2011-2014. She is currently chairing the 2016 Interaction Awards program.

An evangelist for drawing, sketching, and the power of visual communication, MJ coaches people in reclaiming their innate drawing skills through instructional workshops of her own design. Creating visual notes is one of her favorite ways to share great content. People often tell her she has incredibly neat handwriting.

MJ will be our Visual Scribe.

Nathan Curtis Founder, EightShapes

Nathan Curtis has been swimming in the deep end of the UX pool since 1996, when he started focusing his creative energies on IA, ID, usability, and front-end development. Nathan authored Modular Web Design and has presented and led daylong workshops for years on the topics of design systems, component and pattern libraries, sketching, and design communications. He’s also an entrepreneur at heart, having founded EightShapes, a UX design agency headquartered in Washington, DC.

Nathan is speaking as part of our Designing Design Systems theme and teaching a workshop.

Adam Cutler Design Studio Program Director, IBM Design

Adam Cutler is the Design Studio Program Director with IBM Design. He is responsible for the IBM Design Studio in Austin, TX while advising the other Studio Directors globally. He is also responsible for the competency, culture and practices of design and designers at IBM.

Previously while at IBM Interactive, he was the Director of User Experience Design and helped to guide clients and internal initiatives in the creation of valuable, dynamic and effective user experiences. He has worked with many clients including OpenPediatrics for Boston Children’s Hospital, Nordea, The JFK Museum & Library, Liberty Mutual, Bank of America, Nationwide, Wachovia, L.L.Bean, State Street, American Express, IBM, Segway, Chubb Insurance and Tiffany & Co. among others.

Prior to joining IBM, Adam worked with Michael Jordan while at an advertising agency in Chicago, and helped to pioneer the first e-commerce transaction from outer space.

Adam is speaking as part of our Growing UX Talent and Teams theme.

Richard Dalton VP, Head of Design, Capital One Commercial Bank

Richard has led design teams in large organizations for 15 years. He is a recognized thought-leader in the UX and IA field and chaired the 2008 IA Summit in Miami. He has spoken widely on the topic of maturing the Experience Design discipline and on establishing language, management, and measurement frameworks for the experiences we create. He has recently joined Capital One to lead their commercial banking design team. His juggling is quite good and his guitar playing is not.

Richard is leading The Politics of Innovation theme.

Maria Giudice VP, Experience Design, Autodesk

Innovator, artist, protagonist, and positive provocateur, Maria has pursued a vision of intelligent, elegant, people-centered design throughout her professional life. Her grasp of the pragmatic, the authentic, and the essential have kept her at the forefront of design and business for over 25 years.

Under Maria’s leadership, Hot Studio, the experience design firm she founded in 1997, grew into a full-service creative agency with an impressive list of Fortune 500 clients. In March 2013, Facebook acquired the talent behind Hot Studio. In 2015, she joined Autodesk as VP, Experience Design. Her latest book, Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design, is published by New Riders. Maria is an AIGA Design Fellow. She has spoken at conferences all over the world and currently serves as an adjunct professor and trustee at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Maria is speaking as part of our Politics of Innovation theme.

Dave Gray author of The Connected Company

Dave Gray helps large organizations solve complex problems related to culture, innovation and change. His approach involves getting the right people together and facilitating the group, to help them collaboratively develop new strategies, launch products and services, and design as well as deliver organizational change initiatives. He uses structured approaches that help people think, solve problems, and make decisions quickly and collaboratively, with minimum friction.

Dave has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies across all industries. His approaches are not proprietary. They are clearly articulated and have been made publicly available in his book, Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers and Changemakers. His second book, The Connected Company, describes a new breed of adaptive, fast-moving organization that’s emerging in the 21st century. In 1993, Dave founded the design consultancy XPLANE, growing it to a multi-million-dollar business before selling it in 2010. He now works as an independent consultant with select clients.

His current project is Boardthing, a collaboration platform for distributed teams. Dave delivers keynotes and hands-on workshops on topics related to innovation, culture and change.

Dave is teaching a workshop.

Nalini P. Kotamraju Senior Director of User Research, Salesforce.com

Nalini is currently Senior Director of User Research at Salesforce.com, leading a team of researchers in a design group.

She is also Associate Professor in Culture & Communication at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark and Affiliate Faculty at University of Washington’s Department of Communication in Seattle, Washington.

Most recently, Nalini was Senior Design Research Manager at Microsoft Business Solutions (Dynamics AX). She also worked as Lead User Researcher for Sun Microsystem’s (now Oracle) Software User Experience Group in Menlo Park, California. Even earlier, Nalini worked on the conference organizing team of the historic NGO Forum on Women ’95 Beijing (the NGO complement to the United Nations Conference for Women) and for Amnesty International USA.

Nalini is speaking as part of our Designing Design Systems theme.

Sam Ladner Senior UX Researcher, Amazon

Sam Ladner is a sociologist who studies the changing nature of work, technology, and organizations. Her past work has included studies on the productivity of engineers, physicians, lawyers, financial services workers, and various other workplace studies. She is the author of Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in The Private Sector, and an adjunct professor at the University of Washington, where she teaches strategic forecasting. She currently works as a senior UX researcher at Amazon, working on a V1 product. She received her PhD in sociology from York University and currently lives in Seattle with her husband.

Sam is speaking as part of our How to Succeed when Everyone is Your User theme.

John Maeda Design Partner for Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers

John Maeda is an American designer, engineer and creative leader.

An internationally recognized voice at the intersection of design and the technology industry,
Maeda works with early-, mid- and late-stage start-up CEOs as Design Partner at Kleiner
Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) in Silicon Valley. At the start of 2015, Fast Company named
KPCB one of the ten most innovative companies in design – a position fortified by Maeda’s
subsequent launching of the “#DesignInTech Report” which covers venture capital funding and
M&A activity for design in the technology industry (available free at http://kpcb.com/design).

Maeda received his BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from
MIT, with his MS thesis entitled “Concurrent Sparse Matrix Equation Solver for Three-
dimensional Semiconductor Simulation.” He earned an MBA from Arizona State University and a
PhD from University of Tsukuba in Japan. He’s been awarded honorary doctorates in Fine Arts
from Maryland Institute College of Art and Simon Fraser University, and his other awards
include the White House’s National Design Award, the Blouin Foundation’s Creative Leadership
Award, the AIGA Medal, the Raymond Loewy Foundation Prize, the Mainichi Design Prize, the
Tokyo Type Director’s Club Prize, and induction into the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame.

A celebrated author and speaker, his books include The Laws of Simplicity, Creative Code, and
Redesigning Leadership, which expands on his Twitter feed @johnmaeda, one of TIME
Magazine’s 140 Best Twitter Feeds. Maeda’s talks on design, technology, and leadership for
TED.com have received cumulative views of over 2 million to date, and his live addresses to
audiences around the world from Davos to Beijing to São Paulo to NYC have been favorably
received. As a contemporary artist, Maeda’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in
Paris, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, San Francisco, and NYC – and he continues to make art,
design, and write software codes.

John will be giving our closing keynote.

Fredrik Matheson Experience Lead, BEKK

Fredrik has spent the last decade working on digitization and collaboration projects for large enterprises in finance, insurance, telecoms, aviation, manufacturing, engineering and government. Simple to use is hard to do, and nowhere is this more true than in the enterprise. Applying a designish curiosity to the constantly evolving value chains, competitive landscape, core capabilities and rigidities of the enterprise is the best way to make great things happen.

Fredrik’s experience working with air traffic controllers, financial comptrollers, actuaries, network managers and hundreds of other specialists has taught him the value of patience, resilience, optimism and the odd bit of blackmail in helping enterprises outlive their cash cows, and just how much of a difference design thinking can make, when done right.

Fredrik also co-founded IxDA Oslo and helped it grow into one of the world’s biggest and best-run IxDA groups with 2400+ members and 100+ highly-rated meetups with international speakers.

Fredrik is speaking as part of our How to Succeed when Everyone is Your User theme.

Harry Max VP of Product and Technology, AllClear ID

Harry rejoined AllClear ID in 2014, after first working with the company during its early stage in 2005. As VP of Product & Technology, Harry is responsible for Product Design, Development, Security, IT, and Engineering. Prior to his return to AllClear ID, Harry was VP of Product & Design at Rackspace, where he helped lead the company’s transformation to being a user-centric, design-driven cloud computing company. During Harry’s tenure at Rackspace, he established a world-class Experience Design capability, led control panel development, and drove initiatives for customer self-service. Harry also brings years of experience as a consultant and executive coach working with technology leaders at global brands such as Google, PayPal and SAP. Harry began his career in user experience and product design as co-founder of Virtual Vineyards (Wine.com), where he was responsible for on-line store design, development, operations, business processes improvement, and customer self service.

Harry is speaking as part of our Politics of Innovation theme.

Jack Moffett Manager Apps Development – GUI, Inmedius, a Boeing Company

Jack manages the apps development group at GUI Inmedius, a Boeing company. With a BFA in Graphic Design from West Virginia University and a Masters in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon, he has been designing web, desktop, and mobile applications for over 15 years in both research and industry environments. Jack has designed software tools for Lockheed Martin, Shell, DaimlerChrysler, Eaton, and many organizations within the U.S. military, including Joint Service Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Naval Reactors, and NCIS. He teaches design part-time at WVU, authored Bridging UX and Web Development, co-founded and leads IxDA Pittsburgh, chaired Midwest UX 2015, and writes about design on designaday.tumblr.com.

Jack is leading our Designing Design Systems theme.

Dawn Ressel Experience Design Manager, Intuit

Dawn Ressel is a seasoned user experience leader, interaction designer, and design strategist. She is currently an Experience Design Manager at Intuit, leading a central design team working on cross-company initiatives. Her team focuses on improving the financial lives of consumers, small business owners and accountants. Dawn has been in the field of user experience design for over 15 years, with 7 years at Intuit. Prior to Intuit, Dawn worked as both an in-house and external design consultant, focusing on healthcare and higher education industries. Dawn is a part of Intuit’s Innovation Catalyst program: a cross-discipline group that coaches product teams using design thinking methods.

Dawn’s talk will focus on how to scale design systems through reusable user experiences in code: what we call “UI widgets.” These UI widgets encapsulate rich, back-end technology, including APIs and analytics while codifying best practices from a user experience perspective.

Dawn is speaking as part of our Designing Design Systems theme.

Karen Pascoe SVP of User Experience, MasterCard

Karen is SVP of User Experience for Emerging Payments, responsible for leading the design of key consumer & customer facing experiences for MasterCard’s broader transition to digital. She is also responsible for leading design of our third party developer tools, to bring MasterCard capabilities to a broader set of commerce and money movement innovations. Karen’s focus is on connecting business strategy with deep user insights to deliver innovative design solutions at global scale. She is also expert with transactional systems. Prior to joining MasterCard, Karen has held leadership roles at PayPal and JPMorgan Chase. She lives and works in New York City.

Karen is speaking as part of our Growing UX Talent and Teams theme.

Greg Petroff CXO, GE Digital

Greg Petroff is the CXO, (Chief Experience Officer) at GE Digital and the Executive Director of Platform Evangelism for GE. At GE, he leads efforts to define the human experience of the Industrial Internet, connecting people to machines and systems in meaningful ways.

Greg has managed teams and practiced as a designer for over 20 years in user experience, branding and customer experience roles. Greg was a founding board member of the Interaction Design Association and chair of interaction09|Vancouver.

Greg will be giving our opening keynote.

Andy Polaine Design Director, Fjord

Andy Polaine is a Design Director at the global design and innovation consultancy Fjord where he divides his time between client work and Fjord Evolution. He is co-author of the Rosenfeld Media book, Service Design: From Insight to Implementation and a Rosenfeld Expert. Andy has had a long career as an academic and independent consultant, working commercially with clients such as Mobiliar, Telenor, Optus, Three UK, VW Germany, Proto Partners and live|work. He can be found online at polaine.com, on Twitter as@apolaine and is Founding Editor of The Designer’s Review of Books.

Andy is teaching a workshop.

Samantha Soma Design Facilitator, GE

Samantha Soma joined GE in 2011 as the UX Community Lead, fresh from getting a Ph.D. focused on conflict resolution and community development. Now a Design Facilitator, she runs customer co-creation and design strategy workouts for GE Digital, helping cross-functional teams understand real world problems and the people that have them, and discovering new ways to use design to solve them. Samantha’s eclectic background has equipped her with a uniquely diverse set of skills, including mediation, design research, and team-building.

Samantha is teaching a workshop.

Ian Swinson Global Head of UX, Anaplan

Over the past 20+ years Ian Swinson has balanced his time between agencies, startups and enterprise software companies. As the first designer at Salesforce.com he was instrumental in growing the UX team to over 100. Initially focused on design excellence Ian’s transition to a full-time management position allowed him to turn the UX process on itself with the goal of designing better teams and processes.

He is active in the design community speaking at numerous events about pattern libraries, design in an agile world, and his foundational work in establishing a common framework for UX careers with the goal of supporting individual contributors and managers alike in helping everyone design their dream job.

As a Canadian and a graduate of McGill University’s Film & Communications you are more than welcome to count the number of times he says “sorry” and ask about his favorite SCTV sketch.

Ian is speaking as part of our Growing UX Talent and Teams theme.

Russ Unger Experience Design Director at 18F

Russ Unger is an Experience Design Director at 18F in Chicago where he leads teams and projects in design and research. He is co-author of the books: A Project Guide to UX Design, Designing the Conversation and Speaker Camp for New Riders (Voices That Matter). Russ is also working on a book on guerrilla design and research methods that is due out, well, sometime.

Russ is co-funder of ChicagoCamps, which hosts low-cost, high-value technology events in the Chicago area, and he is also on the Advisory Board for the Department of Web Design and Development at Harrington College of Design. Russ has two daughters who both draw better than he does and are currently beginning to surpass his limited abilities in coding.

Russ is speaking as part of our How to Succeed When Everyone Is Your User theme.

Dan Willis UX Consultant, Cranky Productions

Dan Willis is a consultant, author and speaker who has been designing digital products for two decades. Along the way, he has solved complex problems at a wide variety of major enterprises, from media companies, U.S. government agencies and financial institutions to a car manufacturer and a popular NYC museum.

Dan is our Enterprise Storytelling session coordinator.

Susan Worthman Business Design Strategist/Professor, California College of the Arts

Susan Worthman is a business design strategist, with a background in new market development, systems thinking and organizational design. She has over 15 years’ experience helping multidisciplinary groups devise new products, services and business models through design thinking and business model innovation. Susan has held senior management positions in nonprofits, Fortune 500s and startups in the US and Europe. An ‘accidental designer-academic’’, she has worked at the California College of the Arts since 2009, where she founded and led the Leading by Design Fellows Program at the California College of the Arts, an executive education program in innovation leadership for strategic change. She is the Associate Chair for the Design Strategy and the Strategic Foresight MBA programs, and an Associate Professor in innovation and experience design. She holds an MBA in Strategic Management from San Francisco State University and a BA in History from the University of Pennsylvania.

Susan is leading the Growing UX Talent and Teams theme.