We are happy till welcome Christopher Noessel back to FBTB!
Chris is a veteran of the interaction design industry, having designed products, crafted services, and helped clients with design strategy across many disparate domains for more than 20 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 one of the Lead Designers for Watson Customer Engagement at IBM.
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 (Rosenfeld 2017), 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.