News & Events

Dan Boyarski is a communication designer with 30 years in education and the profession. He is Professor of Design at CMU’s School of Design, where he has been for almost 20 years. He teaches courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in typography, information design, and human-computer interaction design. Dan is interested in how words, images, sound, and motion may be combined to produce effective communication. He received an MFA in Graphic Design from Indiana University and later spent two years at the School for Design in Basel, Switzerland.

Quentin Jones is an Assistant Professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology in the Department of Information Systems. His research interests are primarily in the area of Social Computing and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Specifically, he is interested in how various social computing system designs can both enable and constrain interpersonal and group interactions, and how the use of such systems can lead to the expansion of social ties/capital. He directs the SmartCampus (NSF Funded) initiative to explore these challenging research questions.

John Canny is a Professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. His 1987 Ph.D. was from MIT in robotics, and received the ACM doctoral dissertation award. His research then focused on the interaction between computers and the physical world—robotics, geometry, vision and computational biology. Since the 1990s he has focused on the democratization of computing, and what it means to design systems for the everyday. In 2002, he started the Berkeley Institute of Design, an interdisciplinary, human-centered design research lab. BID now houses 30 researchers from 8 departments.

Katie Minardo Scott is an interaction designer at MAYA Design, in Pittsburgh, PA. Katie has built a diverse portfolio of projects, using human-centered methods to develop pocket-sized medical monitors, explore gesture interfaces for cars, refine imaging software for cardiologists, conduct field research with soldiers, build visualization tools for intelligence analysts, and study the shopping habits of teenage girls. She joined MAYA after a three-year stint at The MITRE Corporation, a government research and development center in Boston.

Liz Gerber is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University. She holds courtesy appointments in the Schools of Management and Education. Liz researches how work practices and technology influences creative problem solving. In 2008, Liz founded Design for America, an award winning, nationwide initiative for college campuses that inspires students to use human centered design to create local and social impact. Previously, Liz taught at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the d.school).

Before joining CMU, Fei Fang was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) at Harvard University, hosted by David Parkes and Barbara Grosz. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California advised by Milind Tambe (now at Harvard).

Golan Levin’s work combines equal measures of the whimsical, the provocative, and the sublime in a wide variety of online, installation and performance media. Through performances, digital artifacts, and virtual environments, Levin applies creative twists to new technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, make visible our ways of interacting with each other, and explore the intersection of abstract communication and interactivity.

Marianna Obrist is a Lecturer in Interaction Design at the University of Sussex, at the School of Engineering and Informatics. She joined Sussex after spending two years as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Culture Lab of the School of Computing Science in Newcastle University. Before that Marianna was an Assistant Professor for Human-Computer Interaction and Usability at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Salzburg, Austria. The focal point of her research is to create a rich and systematic understanding on users experiences with interactive technologies.

Uday Gajendar is a proven design leader focused on new product innovation & guiding start-ups on UX fundamentals. Uday has 15 years of versatile expertise at Frogdesign, Citrix, Peel, Netflix, Adobe, CloudPhysics and others, spanning enterprise to consumer, web to mobile domains. He also regularly writes for ACM Interactions and routinely speaks worldwide on design topics at SXSW, UX Australia, IxDA, and other venues. You can read Uday’s thoughts on design at his blog, www.ghostinthepixel.com.