Confirmed Speakers
Rachel Abrams
Turnstone Consulting
Rachel Abrams is a writer and designer. As creative director of Turnstone Consulting in New York, she tells stories for and about places and spaces. Designing people-friendly, technology-mediated experiences in this collaborative practice, she deals in widespread content: Words that illustrate and pictures that explain. For some clients, that means communications strategy and copywriting, for others, interaction design and consulting.
Click to show/hide more information about Rachel.
Her clients include American Express, the Design Trust for Public Space, Imagination USA, The Map Office, Wolff Olins, and others. This year, she completed a Taxi 07 Design Excellence Fellowship with The Design Trust for Public Space, as co-editor of Taxi 07: Roads Forward, reporting to the City of New York on strategies for its taxi cab industry. Currently, as part of Constellation, an enterprise partnership of multi-disciplinary design firms, she is working on the visual design strategy for the renovation of The Queens Museum of Art in Queens, NY.
Previously, as interactive content strategist with Imagination USA, she contributed to award-winning projects for clients, including Samsung (The Samsung Experience), Intel (at CES), and Bell Canada (Technosport). Before that, she worked for IBM, defining design/ technology standards for ibm.com, and even longer ago, as a graduate student, at Nokia.
She writes regularly about the social implications of design and technology and has been published in print and online by The Economist, Adobe, BBC, Eye, eDesign, Frieze, Good Magazine, Graphics International, and others. [She teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.] Educated at Cambridge University and the Royal College of Art, UK, she has lived in New York since 2000. Originally, current affairs/public policy research led her to interaction design; she situates her presentation at IDEA 07 where these two (pre)occupations overlap.
Jake Barton
Local Projects
Jake is principal of Local Projects, LLC, a design firm that creates media installations for museums and public spaces. Local Projects recent work includes Interaction Design for StoryCorps at Grand Central Terminal and Ground Zero, "Timescapes" the new three-screen introductory theater for the Museum of the City of New York, and the jetBlue StoryBooth at Rockefeller Center. He is a 2006 finalist for the National Design Award for Communications from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, and he has two gold,one silver and one bronze medals from IDSA.
Hasan Elahi
elahi.org
Hasan Elahi is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, simulated time, transport systems, borders and frontiers. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions at venues such as the Venice Biennale; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Kulturbahnhof, Kassel, Germany; The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia; and The Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center in New York. Elahi recently was invited to speak about his work at the Tate Modern in London, Pop!Tech, and at at the American Association of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University.
Click to show/hide more information about Hasan.
His work has been supported with significant grants and numerous sponsorships from the Creative Capital Foundation, Ford Foundation/Philip Morris, and the Asociación Artetik Berrikuntzara in Donostia-San Sebastián in the Basque Country/Spain among others. Currently he is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Sylvia Harris
Information Design Strategist
Sylvia Harris is New York City's "Public Designer". She has devoted twenty-five years to the design and management of public-interest communications.
Click to show/hide more information about Sylvia.
A leading advisor to New York City's largest institutions, Sylvia conducts assessments and formulates communication strategies for branding and public information campaigns. She was the lead design strategist for the redesign of the 2000 National Census and recently developed information master plans for New York Presbyterian Hospital, the American Civil Liberties Union and Columbia University.
She is currently a member of the U.S. Postal Service Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee and is on the advisory committees of WNYC's Studio 360, the Design Trust for Public Spaces and the AIGA's Design for Democracy. She has also lectured around the world and written numerous articles on culture, design and diversity.
From 1990 through 2000 Sylvia was a design critic at the Yale University School of Art. She received her M.F.A. from Yale in 1980 and a B.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1975.
David Rose
Ambient Devices
David Rose is a technology visionary and serial entrepreneur. At Ambient Devices he is pioneering the new consumer category of glanceable technology: embedding Internet information in everyday objects (lamps, mirrors, watches and wearables) to make the physical environment an interface to digital information.
Click to show/hide more information about David.
Previously, Rose founded Viants Innovation Center, an advanced technology group for Fortune 500s including Sony, GM, Schwab, Sprint, Compaq and Fleet. He helped build Viant to over 900 people, $140M in revenues and a successful IPO (NASDAQ:VIAN). In 1997 Rose patented online photosharing and founded Opholio (acquired by FlashPoint Technology). Before the Internet he founded and was President of Interactive Factory (acquired by RDW Group) which creates museum exhibits, educational software and smart toys, including the award-winning LEGO Mindstorms Robotic Invention System.
Rose teaches Information Visualization at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and is a frequent speaker for corporate research departments and conferences. He received his BA in Physics from St. Olaf College, studied Interactive Cinema at the MIT Media Lab, and earned a Masters Degree from Harvard University. To learn more about Ambient Devices visit their website: http://www.ambientdevices.com.
Kevin Slavin
area/code
Kevin Slavin is the Managing Director and co-Founder of area/code. He has worked in corporate communications for technology-based clients for 13 years, including IBM, Compaq, Dell, TiVo, Time/Warner Cable, Microsoft, Wild Tangent and Qwest Wireless.
Click to show/hide more information about Kevin.
Slavin has lectured at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and the Parsons school of design, and has written for various publications on games and game culture. His work has received honors from the AIGA, the One Show, and the Art Directors Club, and he has exhibited internationally, including the Frankfurt Museum fuer Moderne Kunst.
Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg
Many Eyes
Fernanda Viégas is a research scientist in IBM's Visual Communication Lab where her work focuses on social and collaborative aspects of data visualization. Previous projects explored e-mail archives, newsgroup conversations, chat-room interactions, and the editing history of wiki pages. Her visualization-based artwork has been exhibited in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. Viégas holds a Ph.D. from MIT in Media Arts and Sciences.
Martin Wattenberg, is a research scientist in IBM's Visual Communication Lab, focuses on information visualization and its application to collaborative computing, journalism, and art. Wattenberg's visualization artwork has been exhibited in venues ranging from Ars Electronica to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Wattenberg holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from U.C. Berkeley.
David Weinberger
Everything is Miscellaneous
The Wall Street Journal called him a "marketing guru." He's the co-author of the The Cluetrain Manifesto, the bestseller that cut through the hype and told business what the Web was really about. He's been a frequent commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. He's written for the "Fortune 500" of business and tech journals, including The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Guardian, and Wired.
Click to show/hide more information about David.
Journalists from The New York Times, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, InformationWeek, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and many more turn to him for insight. He is a columnist for Knowledge Management World and il sole 24 ore, and writes an influential business technology newsletter and a well-known daily weblog, Joho the Blog. He was a philosophy professor for six years, a comedy writer for Woody Allen for seven years, a humor columnist for Oregon's major daily newspaper, a dot-com entrepreneur before most people knew what a home page was, and a strategic marketing consultant to household-name multinationals and the most innovative startups. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy and is currently a Fellow at the prestigious Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. His latest book is Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, published by Times Books.
Dr. David Weinberger turns this remarkable range of experience and knowledge to the most important question facing every business today: How is technology changing the way my employees, partners and customers are putting themselves together, and how is that changing the basics of my business?
Michael Wesch
The Machine is Us/ing Us
Wesch graduated summa cum laude from the Kansas State University Anthropology Program in 1997 and returned as a faculty member in 2004 after graduate studies at the University of Virginia. There he pursued research on social and cultural change in Melanesia, living in the Mountain Ok region of Papua New Guinea for a total of 18 months from 1999-2003. Wesch has received numerous grants and fellowships for his research, including a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, Explorer's Club Grant, and a Fulbright-Hays International Dissertation Research Fellowship.
Click to show/hide more information about Michael.
Wesch is launching the Digital Ethnography working group at Kansas State University to examine the impacts of digital technology on human interaction. The first outcome of this work was a short video called "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us." The video was released on YouTube on January 31, 2007, and quickly became the most popular video in the blogosphere and the #1 featured YouTube video on February 7, 2007. Wesch is also a multiple award-winning teacher active in the development of innovative teaching techniques. Currently he is involved in the Peer Review of Teaching Project, a nation-wide consortium of universities pursuing new ways to improve and evaluate student learning. As part of this project, Wesch has developed a World Simulation for large introductory classes in cultural anthropology. You can read more about the world simulation and other aspects of Weschs innovative teaching techniques at Savage Minds, http://www.savageminds.org/.
Alex Wright (Photo by Tim Gasperak)
http://www.alexwright.org/
Alex Wright is a writer and information architect who currently works for the New York Times. His first book, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, was released in 2007 by Joseph Henry Press.
Click to show/hide more information about Alex.
Alex's writing has appeared in Salon.com, The Christian Science Monitor, The Believer, Harvard Magazine, Utne Reader, Yankee, Think, Boxes and Arrows, New Architect, WebTechniques, Boston Business, Design Times and Library Journal, among others.
As an information architect, Alex has led projects for The New York Times, IBM, Microsoft, Harvard University, The Long Now Foundation, Internet Archive, Yahoo!, Macromedia and Sun Microsystems, among others.
In his pre-Web career, Alex worked as a writer and editor for several Boston-area magazines, and as a librarian at Harvard University. His work has won numerous industry awards, including a Webby nomination (for Rollyo), Cool Site of the Year award (for Kasparov vs. Deep Blue), the PRSA Silver Anvil and an American Graphic Design Award (for IBM.com).
A popular speaker and lecturer, Alex has presented at Gartner Group, UC-Berkeley, the Institute of Design-Chicago, Seybold, the ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit, CMP Web conferences, Association of Internet Professionals, Creating for the Web, and numerous IBM conferences.
Alex holds a B.A. in English and American Literature from Brown University and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College. He has also completed graduate coursework in journalism at Harvard, and in usability engineering at UC-Berkeley.
Alex grew up in Richmond, Virginia and Sussex, England.
