Confirmed Speakers

We are excited to provide our list of confirmed speakers for the IDEA Conference. Each speaker brings a unique perspective, experience, and ingenuity to IDEA that we wanted to showcase as part of our dynamic presentation-based conference. A program and list of topics will be available soon, in the meantime, please read the following bios as an introduction of IDEA's program.

Visit Site David Armano VP Experience Design, Critical Mass

David has over 14 years of experience in the communications industry, having spent the majority of his time in digital marketing and experience design. An active thought leader in the industry, David authors the popular Logic + Emotion blog currently ranked in the top 25 of the "Power 150," as listed by Advertising Age. David's writing and visual thinking has been cited by respected sources, such as Forrester and Crain's, and has landed him in BusinessWeek on several occasions including their "Best of 2006". David leads an interdisciplinary group of designers, writers and content strategists for the Chicago office of Critical Mass. Aside from his presence on the Web, David is known as an evangelist for customer-centric strategies and acts as an advocate for the creation of meaningful interactions, which influence behavior. In his spare time he contributes articles to various professional publications and spends as much quality time with his family as possible.

Visit Site Chris Crawford Author & Inventor, Storytron

Chris Crawford earned a Master of Science degree in Physics from the University of Missouri in 1975. After teaching physics for several years, he joined Atari as a game designer in 1979. There he created a number of games: Energy Czar, an educational simulation about the energy crisis, Scram, a nuclear power plant simulation, Eastern Front (1941), a wargame, Gossip, a social interaction game, and Excalibur, an Arthurian game.

Following the collapse of Atari in 1984, Crawford took up the Macintosh. He created Balance of Power, a game about diplomacy, Patton Versus Rommel, a wargame, Trust & Betrayal, a social interaction game, Balance of the Planet, an environmental simulation game, and Patton Strikes Back, a wargame. In 1992, Crawford decided to leave game design and concentrate his energies on interactive storytelling, a field that he believed would become important. He created a major technology for interactive storytelling systems, patenting it in 1997. He is now commercializing his technology at his company website, storytron.com.

Visit Site Bill DeRouchey Sr. Interaction Designer, Ziba Design

Bill has over fifteen years experience as a writer, information architect, product manager and now senior interaction designer with Ziba Design in Portland, Oregon. With Ziba, he frames and details the experience, flow, and interaction on consumer and medical products. Bill also writes about the variety and history of interaction design in everyday experiences on his blog, Push Click Touch, and is a frequent speaker at industry events. He is determined to stretch how people think about interaction design, from beyond the pure digital to any interaction between humans and the artifacts they create. Bill is on the Board of Directors of IxDA, the Interaction Design Association.

Visit Site Jason Fried Co-founder and President, 37signals

Jason Fried is the co-founder and President of 37signals, a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based tools possible with the least number of features necessary. 37signals' products include Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire, Ta-da List, and Writeboard. 37signals also developed and open-sourced the Ruby on Rails programming framework. 37signals' products do less than the competition -- intentionally. Jason believes there's real value and beauty in the basics. Elegance, respect for people's desire to simply get stuff done, and honest ease of use are the hallmarks of 37signals products.

Aradhana Goel Service Design Strategist, IDEO

Aradhana Goel has 8+ years of experience, ranging from service innovation to user experience design to architecture and urban design. As a Service Design Strategist at IDEO, she brings a systemic approach for designing user experiences across multiple touchpoints over a period of time. She is an analytical thinker and her strength lies in managing issues of scale and complexity that arise when designing a service ecology. At IDEO, Aradhana has worked with medical insurance, automobile, telecommunication and financial service industries. Most of her work involves helping companies differentiate themselves in the marketplace through a 2-5 year out strategic direction and design of innovative service and product offerings .

Prior to IDEO, Aradhana worked as a Senior Information Designer at MAYA, a design consultancy cum research lab in Pittsburgh. At MAYA, she worked with established companies and institutions like the Carnegie Library, US Postal Service and Eaton Corporation, to transform them from a traditional operation-centric approach to a customer-centric environment.

Aradhana holds a MS degree in Design Technology from MIT, Cambridge, and a Masters Degree in Urban Design from School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi. Her first attempt at cross-pollinating architecture/urban design with information/digital design was evidenced in her MIT thesis 'Urban Pilot' (2001), where she explored the power of social networks to design a living city guide for mobile users.

Visit Site Dave Gray Founder & Chairman, XPLANE

Dave Gray is the Founder and Chairman of XPLANE, the visual thinking company. Founded in 1993, XPLANE has grown to be the world's leading consulting and design firm focused on information-driven communications. Dave's time is spent researching and writing on visual business, as well as speaking, coaching and delivering workshops to educators, corporate clients and the public.

He is also a founding member of VizThink, an international community of Visual Thinkers.

Visit Site Andrew Hinton Lead Information Architect, Vanguard

Since 1990, Andrew Hinton has worked as a designer, instructor, writer and consultant of various stripes in the healthcare, financial, consumer and manufacturing industries. Clients have been small and large, including Fortune 500s such as American Express, Shaw, Wachovia and Kimberly-Clark. Andrew is now a Lead Information Architect in mutual-fund giant Vanguard's User Experience Group.

From his pre-Web education, Andrew holds a BA in Philosophy, an MA in Literature and an MFA in Writing. He's a regular speaker at conferences like the IA Summit, and sometimes writes for publications like Boxes & Arrows. His current obsessions include Communities of Practice, social design factors, what games teach us about design, and the meaning of context in digital spaces.

A co-founder of the IA Institute, he serves on its Board of Advisors. He also keeps a home on the web at inkblurt.com.

Visit Site Jason Kunesh Independent Design Professional

Jason Kunesh has designed user interfaces for desktop applications, websites, kiosks, and mobile devices for more than 15 years. He has consulted with startups, non-profit institutions, and Fortune 500 companies including Orbitz, LeapFrog, McDonald's, the Chicago Field Museum, thePoint.com, United Airlines, Microsoft, Giant Bike and Jabber.

Jason taught web design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has a Master's Degree in Human Computer Interaction from DePaul University and a Bachelor's Degree in English from the University of Wisconsin. He is a member of the Information Architecture Institute, the Association for Computing Machinery and the Usability Professionals Association.

Visit Site Elliott Malkin Artist & Information Architect

Elliott Malkin is an artist and information architect whose work explores the intersection of memory, information, and physical space. His work has focused on the eruv, a symbolic boundary erected around Jewish neighborhoods as part of the observation of the Sabbath. This includes eRuv, a virtual reconstruction of an eruv that once existed in lower Manhattan, and Modern Orthodox, a next-generation eruv constructed with lasers and surveillance cameras. Many of Elliott's other projects concern the use of new media as a proxy for memory. His short film Family Movie is a reconstruction of scenes from his family's collection of home movies from the 1970's. He is also the creator of Cemetery 2.0, a device that connects gravestones to the genealogical database of the Mormon Church. His most recent work is Graffiti for Butterflies, a project designed to facilitate interspecies communication between humans and monarch butterflies in urban areas. Elliott is originally from Chicago and currently lives in New York City, where he works as an Information Architect for The New York Times. His work has been featured at Eyebeam, the International Documentary Festival, and The Contemporary Artists' Center.