IDEA2009: Meet Up at the intersection of Social and Experience Design, brought to you by the IA Institute

Stephen P. Anderson

Product Strategy and Design Consultant

Stephen P. Anderson helps large companies create valuable customer experiences.

Prior to becoming an independent consultant, Stephen spent more than a decade growing and leading teams of information architects, interaction designers and UI developers in the creation of all types of interactive experiences, bringing value to clients such as Nokia, Frito-Lay, Sabre Travel Network, and Chesapeake Energy as well as smaller technology startups.

• Blog: poetpainter.com »
• Twitter: @stephenanderson »

Christian Crumlish

Curator, Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

Christian Crumlish has been designing and writing about online user experiences since 1994. He is a director of the Information Architecture Institute and co-chair of the monthly BayCHI program. He is the author of The Power of Many and is writing a book called Designing Social Interfaces for O'Reilly Media with Erin Malone.

• Blog: wake up! you can observe a lot just by watching »
• Twitter: @mediajunkie »

Nathan Curtis

Founder & Principal, EightShapes, LLC

Nathan Curtis is a founder and principal at EightShapes, LLC, a user experience consulting firm based in Washington, DC, and has practiced information architecture, interaction design, usability research, and front-end development since 1996. Over the past three years, Nathan has provided design and training services for user experience teams large and small on topics including interaction design, patterns, components, and documentation best practices. Nathan enjoys discovering the potential of many design software tools including Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator, and his upcoming book Modular Web Design: Creating Reusable Components for UX Design & Documentation is due from Peachpit Press in the summer of 2009.

• Website: EightShapes Unify »
• Blog: nathancurtis.com »
• Twitter: @nathanacurtis »

Jeff Dachis

CEO, Dachis Group

Jeff’s leadership and vision helped establish the digital services industry more than a decade ago when he co-founded Razorfish, Inc. out of a one-bedroom New York apartment as its CEO, President, and Chairman.

He led its $55 million IPO, and grew it into one of the the world’s largest digital solutions providers with 2,500 employees in 15 offices across 9 countries, and over $280 million in annual revenue.

Razorfish ultimately was sold to Microsoft as part of aQuantive for $6 billion. He is Co-Chair of the Producer’s Guild of America New Media Council East, and a frequent lecturer and speaker, with appearances on CNBC, CNN, 20/20 and 60 Minutes among others. His honors include Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2000, among many others.

• Website: Dachis Group »
• Twitter: @jeffdachis »

Maya Kalman

Founder & CEO, Swank Productions

Maya Kalman is the Founder & CEO of Swank Productions, New York's most fashionable wedding planning, event design and production company. Maya has planned and designed large and small-scale events for some of the top brands and personalities in New York City and around the world. Voted "Best of the Best" Event Planners in NYC by the Knot Magazine.

In addition to her diverse client list, Maya is a frequent media guest for television, radio, print and online networks. Maya’s next appearance will be on TNT’s Fantasy Show “Wedding Day,” premiering in June 30, 2009.

• Website: Swank Productions »
• Blog: Swank Productions, NYC »
• Twitter: @mayakalman »

Mari Luangrath

Owner & President, Foiled, Inc.

Mari Luangrath has always been passionate about bringing people together. As the force behind the newly launched Foiled, Inc., Chicagoland's only exclusive online gourmet cupcake order and delivery service, her goal is to help foster relationships while providing the absolute best in personal service, delivery and quality.

Foiled Cupcakes launched its website in June 2009 and started marketing via Twitter - quite by accident. It was a good accident, though. The company more than doubled its first month's expectations and has already serviced over a hundred Fortune 500 companies in Chicago's metropolitan area.

• Website: Foiled Cupcakes »
• Blog: Foiled Cupcakes Blog »
• Twitter: @foiledcupcakes »

Thomas Malaby

Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology,
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Thomas Malaby (www.uwm.edu/~malaby) is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has published numerous works on virtual worlds, games, practice theory, and indeterminacy. His principal research interest is in the relationships among institutions, unpredictability, and technology, particularly as they are realized through games and game-like processes.

• Blog: Terra Nova »

Erin Malone

Principal, Tangible ux

Erin has over 20 years of experience leading design teams and developing web and software applications, social experiences and system-wide solutions. Prior to Tangible, she was at Yahoo! where she led the Platform User Experience Design team and was responsible for building the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and for providing design expertise to the popular YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library).

• Website: designingsocialinterfaces.com »
• Blog: dezining interactions »
• Twitter: @emalone »

Matthew Milan

Partner, Normative

Matthew is a designer and entrepreneur who likes to get his hands dirty in as many places as possible. Currently this means a mix of experience design, service design and strategy, but in the past he’s designed everything from spatial technology to ski hills.

He is currently a Partner at Normative, a Toronto-based design strategy studio that helps companies make their products, services and experiences relevant and valuable in an increasingly complex world. Over the last ten years, Matthew has lead large design and strategy teams, slept under his desk at successful startups and tried most of the things he’s been told he couldn’t or shouldn’t. In his free time, he obsesses over soft systems theory, maneuver warfare strategy, urban technologies and the notion of the hacker family.

• Twitter: @mmilan »

Mary Newsom

Associate Editor, Charlotte Observer

Mary Newsom is a columnist, blogger and editorial board member at the Charlotte Observer, the largest daily newspaper in North Carolina. An expert on city and regional growth and urban design, she spent the 2007-08 academic year as a Nieman Fellow studying at Harvard University. From 2005-06 she was a fellow in the Knight Program in Community Building at the University of Miami School of Architecture.

Mary is a member of the Citistates Group, a team of writers, researchers and practitioners focused on the economic, environmental and social challenges facing metropolitan regions. She was a founding member of the nonprofit discussion groups Civic By Design and the Charlotte Urban Forum.

Tim Queenan

Executive Director, Digital Presence, Draftfcb

Tim is currently the Executive Director of Draftfcb NY’s Digital Practice: responsible for integrating the office’s inter-disciplinary digital team that focuses on content creation and media planning and buying for the digital space.

Clients include the White House’s Office of the National Drug Control Policy, Hampton Inns, Merck, Starbucks, U.S. Census Bureau, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Plan B, Fisher Price, and SkyTeam. Additionally, Tim leads the digital planning and activation for the upcoming 2010 U.S. Census integrated communications campaign.

Previous to Draftfcb Tim worked at Lucent Technologies and Avaya, Inc. leading highly successful global demand generation campaigns. Prior to Lucent and Avaya, Tim bopped around the “dot-com” circuit, while shopping a novel. Tim earned his B.A. from Columbia University, majoring in English and minoring in Physics and Semiotics. He fenced for 12 years, competing nationally and training with the U.S. Olympic team.

• Twitter: @the_tq »

Leisa Reichelt

Design Researcher & User Experience Designer

Leisa Reichelt is a freelance design researcher & user experience designer who has worked with global brands, innovative startups and open source communities to help them deliver great online experiences for their customers and community members.

Throughout 2009 she has been working closely with the Drupal open source community on the D7UX project, with the aim of radically improving the user experience of this open source project and as a result, to look carefully at ways that designers might be able to operate more successfully within open source software communities.

• Blog: disambiguity.com »
• Twitter: @leisa »

Christina Wodtke

Principal Instigator, LinkedIn

Christina has been bringing products to market on the web for 12 years now, in a variety of roles from design to entrepreneur to product manager. Her specialty is taking a product from Concept to Reality. At LinkedIn, she leads the team that took LinkedIn Events from idea to launch. Before that she founded Cucina Media and created a (perhaps too) innovative CMS; founded the IA Institute, a thriving nonprofit, as well as Boxes and Arrows, an independent publication on design. As a partner at MIG, she helped clients like The New York Times reinvent search and Rodale concept new Digital products, and at Yahoo she lead the design teams who reinvented Yahoo Seach, Shopping and Local.

In her spare time she gives talks on human behavior in digital spaces, and wrote a book on Information Architecture.

• Website: Elegant Hack »
• Twitter: @cwodtke »
• Website: Boxes and Arrows »

Luke Wroblewski

Director, Product Ideation & Design, Yahoo! Inc.

LukeW is an internationally recognized Web thought leader who has designed or contributed to software used by more than 600 million people. He is currently Senior Director of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc., author of two popular Web design books, and a top-rated speaker at conferences and companies around the world.

• Website: LukeW Interface Designs »
• Twitter: @lukewdesign »