As our business matures and continues to grow, we are constantly looking for new talent to partner with us in our drive for successful user experiences. A major component of that success stems from our belief in quality research to inform our design decisions.
We’d like to warmly welcome Dave McColgin to Artefact! If Dave could be summed up in any fashion, it’d be the letter “T” - in Helvetica. He joins us as a User Researcher, but he also has a knack for design having created prototypes and interactive systems facilitating learning and education. Dave previously worked at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as their HCI Specialist developing innovative visual analytic prototypes and products. Hotness.
Driven by his passion to learn and create, we were excited to learn about his motivational spirit, making him a solid fit without our culture. This kind of energy is especially great within client meetings. It reinforces our shared interest in crafting better experiences for the customer.
Some of the responsibilities that will contribute to our core services include:
designing and implementing research studies informing product design decisions
creating materials needed for research including visual tool kits, prototypes and survey instruments
collect, analyze and synthesize data from people
present insights to clients and internal teams
story boarding and interaction design development
and many more…
Dave also has some ambitious goals to accomplish in the near and long term. Aiming to beat Olen and myself in a match with Spartan weaponry and plasma grenades, we feel he has a long journey ahead of him. The good news though, is that he’s also passionate about adding to our research offerings with the support from his studies in Psychology focused on understanding human behavior and cognition. Things around here are becoming even more exciting as we continue to evolve our research prowess.
The voyage continues as we evolve the research group within Artefact. Today we are happy to introduce our latest member, Gabriel Biller! As we pay homage to our research deities, let’s talk a bit about how Gabe found a place near and dear to our hearts.
Gabe joins us from the Institute of Design as a recent Masters graduate in Design Planning. Prior to ID, Gabe graduated cum laude in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. Sounds fancy right? Well that’s only speaking to his academic history.
Looking further into his professional experience, you can see his research muscles flexing across multiple areas including telecommunications, furniture, restaurant and educational domains. Across all these uniquely defined areas is a single thread that remained consistent: a passion for leading groups and organizations into better futures through design thinking and planning. Most recently, Gabe worked at Steelcase conducting internal research, which led to changes on how certain skills and activities may be supported, taught, and/or reinforced to help spur innovative thinking about current challenges and future opportunities.
We’re excited to have Gabe join us. A few of us already love him because he “let’s us win” at Halo! However, we’re sure he’ll get over being so modest soon enough. He’s also chalk full of great ideas and plans to grow out the business. Exemplary to his potential is a recently launched video, with fellow colleague Kristy Scovel, aimed to help young researchers learn a thing or two on ethnography and interviewing:
“Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer,” which is a 33 minute film (counting credits) to help introduce newbies to some of the basics of ethnography and interviewing. We had a lot of fun making the movie, getting our classmates and faculty, as well as professionals and other outside people, to participate and help us with putting the movie together, and we feel like we found a good balance of levity, humor, and useful information. We’ve gotten good feedback from members of the design community and have even sparked off some old debate amongst the members of the Anthrodesign Yahoo! group.
Having studied Design Planning, we look forward to the insightful findings to come with future projects. Doing that includes:
performing analysis of business, market and financial data identifying business opportunities
working collaboratively with designers and the client to develop innovative ideas and solutions
conducting competitive analysis (SWOT) and presenting insightful recommendations to business strategy and design
learning about people’s aspirations, motivation, activities, habits and practices
story boarding and interaction model development
and many more…
Most importantly, he shares the same vision we do:
help stop the proliferation of stupid crap no one needs and instead, imagine, define and create a better future world.
The videos from the Seattle IxDA Brave New World event are finally up! Thanks for all your patience. Constructive feedback and witty commentary are warmly welcome. Enjoy!
Sabrina Boler in The Beginnings of NUI
Dennis Wixon in The Shock of NUI
Keep in touch because we will be posting more content up related to our DIY multi touch table!
