Contact me chrisscifiinterfaces.com. (Unlinked because spam, of course.)

Christopher Noessel

This is an older, flattering picture of me. But until I get around to getting a pro update of it, it’s what we’re stuck with.

Christopher Noessel is a veteran of the interaction design industry, having designed products, services, and helped clients with design strategy across many disparate domains for more than 25 years. In that time, he co-founded a small interaction design agency where he developed interactive exhibitions and environments for museums. He worked as a director of information design at international Web consultancy marchFIRST, where he also helped establish the interaction design Center of Excellence. For ten years, he worked with a boutique interaction design agency in San Francisco, where he led the “generator” half of that practice. He is now works to design AI with IBM. His desk, when he’s at it, sits near the San Francisco home of Watson.

Christopher was one of the founding graduates of the now-passing-into legend Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy, where his thesis project was a comprehensive service design for lifelong learners called Fresh. The project was presented at the MLearn conference in London in 2003. He has since helped to visualize the future of counterterrorism as a freelancer, built prototypes of coming technologies for Microsoft, and designed telehealth devices to accommodate the crazy facts of modern health care.

Christopher has written for online publications for many years, but was first published in print as co-author of the interaction design pattern chapter in the textbook edited by Simson Garfinkel, RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy. His Spidey sense goes off at random topics, and this has led him to speak at conferences around the world about a wide range of things, including interactive narrative, ethnographic user research, interaction design, sex-related interactive technologies, free-range learning, the future of tech, and the relationship between science fiction and interface design with the 2012 Rosenfeld Media book Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction, coauthored with Nathan Shedroff. He is keeper of the blog scifiinterfaces.com and runs related sci-fi movie nights all over the world. In 2014 he co-authored the 4th Edition of About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, helping modernize it for the six years that had passed since its prior release. His most recent book, Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People, describes the newest mode of interaction made possible by artificial intelligence.

If you run into him on the street and want to get an earful, ask about any of the handful of other books he’s got rattling around in his head. One involves the strange and wonderful world of generative randomness, and another involves the design of technology that helps its users get smart enough to not need it.

Christopher is the initiator, main author, and editor for scifiinterfaces.com.

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Nathan Shedroff

Nathan Shedroff is chair of the groundbreaking MBA in Design Strategy program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. This program melds the unique principles that design offers business strategy with a vision of the future of business as sustainable, meaningful, and truly innovative—as well as profitable.

Nathan is one of the pioneers in experience design and has played an important role in the related fields of interaction design and information design. He is a serial entrepreneur, works in several media, and consults strategically for companies to build better, more meaningful experiences for their customers.

Nathan speaks and teaches internationally and has written extensively on design and business issues. He is the author of Experience Design 1.1, and coauthored Making Meaning with two members of Cheskin, a Silicon Valley–based strategy consultancy, to explore how companies can create products and services specifically to evoke meaning in their audiences and customers. Nathan is editor of the Dictionary of Sustainable Management, a website and now a printed book. He also maintains an extensive set of resources on experience design on his website.

Nathan earned a degree in industrial design with an emphasis on automobile design from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. A passion for information design led Nathan to work with Richard Saul Wurman at TheUnderstandingBusiness. Later, he co-founded vivid studios, a pioneering company in interactive media and one of the first Web services firms. vivid’s hallmark was helping to establish and validate the field of information architecture by training an entire generation of designers in the newly emerging Web industry. Nathan was nominated for a Chrysler Innovation in Design Award in 1994 and 1999, and a National Design Award in 2001. In 2006 Nathan earned an MBA at the Presidio School of Management in San Francisco, the only accredited MBA program in the United States specializing in sustainable business.

Nathan is co-author of Make It So but has not been involved in the website scifiinterfaces.com.

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