Authors

Dave Malouf

Dave Malouf is an observer and pattern recognizer who is passionate about how technology can be a force for positive impact on human beings. With a background in anthropology, design, technology, education and management he is a consultant who helps organizations amplify the impact of their design teams through organizational strategy, recruitment planning, and team mentorship. Dave is also an entrepreneur who has co-founded Peer Loft. The mission of Peer Loft is to create products and services that help teams amplify their creativity. Their first product, Studio Stream, will help design organizations and educational institutions expand their design studios over distances without sacrificing the key elements that make a studio a powerful tool for creativity and team learning.

Dave OBrien

Raised and educated in Toronto, Canada. Lived in San Diego for 10 years, working for Qualcomm and Intuit. Now living in Wellington, New Zealand, working for Optimal Usability.

David Bloxsom

On a slow summer day in 2001, Christina called David: "I've got this idea I'd like to talk out with you..." Several hours, a bottle of pinot gris, and a pair of sunburns later, Boxes and Arrows was born. David also had the unique privilege of serving as the IA for the world's first IA website. He's recently returned to the site in the capacity of general manager with a whole slew of to-do items and a passion to help Boxes and Arrows grow and thrive for another decade. David has spent 16 years working in design, production, IA/UX, and project management. During that time, he developed an integrated design and development process that focused on user-centred design and integrated the then-nascent field of information architecture. His most recent engagement was 12 years with an award-winning video streaming company where he focused on content strategy and worked with specialized taxonomies and controlled vocabularies. This work would become the basis for a presentation he gave at the 2014 IA Summit, "Designing for Villains." He's currently enjoying the wild world of freelancing.

David Pasztor

David has been working in the tech and design industry for more than 15 years, and is the founder of UX Studio, a 30-person UX company based in Budapest. UX Studio works on digital products for international brands including HBO, Bosch, Digic Pictures, Gestalten publishers and the KBC group, and the results are used by millions of people. As well as heading UX Studio, he teaches product design in Budapest and Berlin and gives talks on UX Design around the world. David is also the founder of the UX portfolio platform uxfol.io, where designers can build beautiful portfolios in a few hours (instead of days or weeks). The design community behind uxfol.io is famous of its friendly and supportive atmosphere.

Deborah Barber

Deborah Barber is an independent Information Architect and Interaction Designer living in New York City. She started out in the Internet world 15 years ago as a Front-End developer but realized that her interests lay more in discovering the "why" of digital products and not just the "how." She writes about various topics at her resurrected blog Hexadecibel.org and on Twitter as @hexadecibel. She has been known to play violin on special occasions.

Deborah Gover

Deborah Gover is currently a documentation specialist and a former webmaster at SiemensVDO in Regensburg, Germany, where she has been evangelizing IA for six years. She is a founding member of the first group for IA in Germany and helps organize national meetings there. Deborah is intensely interested in performance psychology and the process of art. A classically trained singer with experience in both opera and song recital, she holds a doctorate degree in music from the University of Michigan.

Demetrius Madrigal

Demetrius truly believes in the power of research, when it is done well. With a background in experimental psychology, Demetrius performed research in the University setting as well as NASA Ames Research Center before co-founding Metric Lab with long-time collaborator, Bryan U. McClain. At Metric Lab, Demetrius enjoys innovating with powerful research methods on exciting projects ranging from consumer electronics with companies like Microsoft or Method, to modernization efforts with the U.S. Army. Demetrius is constantly thinking of new methods and tools that make research faster, less costly, and more accurate.

Diana Sonis

Diana is a passionate believer in holistic, 360 strategy and design, with extensive expertise in UX Design, CX Design, Service Design, and the Design Thinking methodology. As founding partner of CX by Design, Diana’s mission is to identify nuggets of opportunity within an organization, reorient its existing systems and structures to improve the human experience, help others extend their thinking, and drive material business advantage. Having designed, built, and successfully sold several companies, Diana works to help businesses shape abstract concepts into concrete online and offline experiences that respond to the needs and motivations of real people. When she’s not solving strategic challenges, Diana can be found in pursuit of good coffee everywhere.

Dirk Knemeyer

Dirk Knemeyer is a social futurist and a founder of Involution Studios. He has provided consulting, design, and technology to some of the best companies in the world including Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, PayPal, and Shutterfly. Dirk’s writings have been published in places like Business Week and Core77. He has keynoted conferences in Europe and the U.S. and spoken at venues like TEDx, Humanity+, and South by Southwest. Dirk has participated on 15 boards in industries including healthcare, publishing, and education. He holds a Master of Arts in Popular Culture from Bowling Green State University and a Bachelor of Arts in English from The University of Toledo.

Donna Spencer

Donna Spencer is a freelance information architect and interaction designer, a mentor, writer and trainer. She has 8 years experience working in-house and as a consultant doing both strategic and tactical design. She has designed large intranets & websites, e-commerce & search systems, complex business applications, a set of design patterns and a content management system. She believes deeply in the value of user-centred design and uses a range of user-centred approaches on her projects – from quick analysis of existing research to deep ethnography. She also believes deeply in team-based and iterative design – continually surprising her colleagues by talking to people rather than computers and designing the old-fashioned way with pencil, sticky notes and much coloured paper. Donna is an experienced speaker who has taught full-day workshops and presented sessions at many local and international conferences, on the topics of information architecture, interaction design and whatever else crosses her mind. She spends her remaining spare time weaving, gardening and writing a book on card sorting to be published soon by Rosenfeld Media.

Dorelle Rabinowitz

Dorelle Rabinowitz, editor for Boxes and Arrows and a native New Yorker, is Design Manager for Yahoo! Personals. Her 15+ years experience as an information architect, visual and interaction designer, producer, and a storyteller in print and online have not quite prepared her for the culture shock of the west coast, and she will happily discuss the agony of living without Fairway to anyone foolish enough to listen. Previous positions include Information Architect/Experience Lead with SBI.Razorfish, and Sr. Producer of an award winning website on Oxygen.com called Our Stories. A graduate of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, her personal storytelling projects can be found on her website. Dorelle also holds a BFA in graphic design from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Earl Morrogh

, a visiting scholar in Florida State University’s School of Information Studies believes that the professionalization of IA will be as important and as integral to American society as was the professionalization of the field of architecture. He is an FSU alumnus and holds an undergraduate degree in sociology with a minor in architecture and a master’s degree in mass communication with a specialization in interactive communications.

Morrogh is a writer, designer, and educator who has studied and worked for 30 years in several fields including architectural and visual design, multimedia design, communications, and education. He considers these areas of professional interest to be interrelated and his knowledge of them essential for informing his research of the emerging profession of information architecture.

He has worked in both the public and private sectors in a variety of capacities including: art director of an internationally distributed sports magazine (Surf magazine); communications director of the Florida component of the American Institute of Architects; project manager of a National Science Foundation-funded project (the Interactive Media Science Project) in partnership with Apple Computer, Inc., Pioneer, Inc., and Houghton Mifflin Publishing, Inc.; associate director of the Florida Department of Education’s distance learning initiative (Florida Remote Learning Services); and assistant director of Florida State University’s distance learning office (Office of Distributed and Distance Learning).

Born in southwest Louisiana, “Acadiana,” Mr. Morrogh has lived in the Florida panhandle since 1972 where he enjoys living in a rural setting in a house he and his wife of 23 years designed and built.

Elan Freydenson

made his greatest leaps in practicing the craft of interaction design when he used to work for Cooper Interaction Design. These days he consults independently (though with other former Cooperistas) for companies that don't have the liberty to screw up their products. When he's not designing, he can be found playing volleyball, improvising or improvising as a volleyball (you try that sometime.

Elizabeth Ballou

Elizabeth is a content writer and marketer at Clutch, a B2B research firm in the heart of Washington, DC. In her spare time, she writes and designs video games for Green Willow Games. Find her on Twitter at @ebethtargaryen.

Erin Malone

Erin Malone, Principal at Tangible ux, has over 20 years of experience leading design teams and developing web and software applications, social experiences and system-wide solutions. Prior to Tangible, she was at Yahoo! where she led the Platform User Experience Design team and was responsible for building the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and for providing design expertise to the popular YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library). Additionally, she led the redesign of the Yahoo! Developer Network, oversaw the redesign of Yahoo!’s Registration system, designed cross-network social solutions, developed the ux team’s Intranet and other cross-company initiatives. Before Yahoo!, she was a Design Director at AOL leading a range of community and personalization initiatives; Creative Director at AltaVista responsible for the AV Live portal and community tools and Chief Information Architect for Zip2 which produced a custom content management system for local city guides, entertainment guides, maps and yellow pages, including New York Today for the NYTimes. She was the founding editor-in-chief of Boxes and Arrows, a role she served for 5 years. She is the author of several articles on interaction design history and design management and a founding member of the IA Institute. Erin has a BFA in Communication Design from East Carolina University (1986), Greenville NC and an MFA in Information Design from the Rochester Institute of Technology (1994), Rochester NY. She is the author of the book Designing Social Interfaces with Christian Crumlish for O’Reilly Media and its related site designingsocialinterfaces.com.

Experience Planning Group

Faye Miller

Faye is a Researcher, Editor, Author and Educator in the areas of human information experience, informed learning and experience design. Over ten years, Faye has been supporting, developing and leading a variety of social research projects within the global higher education sector and collaborating with external clients from public and private sectors. Faye recently completed a PhD in Information Ecology from Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She has presented her research at San Jose State University, California and has taught online classes in information management at Australian universities. Faye is currently Knowledge Ecology Strategist for Global Ethnographic, official open access journal of the social enterprise Organization for Intra-Cultural Development based in Japan, Australia and the USA. She is also Founding Editor/Director of the international magazine-journal XD: Experience Design Magazine.

Fran Diamond

is an experienced researcher, moderator and user-experience specialist. She develops and designs customized experience-research projects through her company Firstwater, which she founded in 1999. She applies both qualitative and quantitative techniques that bring user insights into the development and design of Internet and web projects. With a background in traditional marketing and advertising as well as with digital solutions and technology, Fran bridges both online and offline marketing, communications and business strategy. Fran has a master's degree in Integrated Marketing Communication from Northwestern University. Fran can be reached at fran (at) firstwater.net .

Frances Forman

Frances is a customer experience researcher and helps plan websites. Previously she has led information architecture projects for public sector, academic and commercial clients, working as a senior usability analyst andd user experience manager. She has solved problems for merging organisations, international companies with multiple sites, educational sites and local authorities. She has eight years experience of commercial research and design projects spanning small medium and very large organisations. Starting out as a consumer scientist for Unilever Research, Frances's first step into commercial usability testing was an evaluation of viral marketing websites for the Lynx (Axe) brand, including a set of virtual mixing decks. Her current interests include IA and accessibility, enabling tools on the web (maps, data mash ups, new communication channels..) and new ways to find people the music they most want to listen to.

Fred Beecher

Fred Beecher has been working in User Experience since 1998. In that time he’s seen UX mature from a field struggling to prove its value to one driving an explosion of innovation and economic growth. To help feed the ever-increasing demand this explosion has sparked, Fred designed and implemented the UX apprenticeship program he currently manages at The Nerdery in Minneapolis, MN. Fred is an established contributor in the UX world. In 2007, he authored the first official Axure training program, which he ran until 2012. He has written numerous articles and blog posts on prototyping, iterative design, and UX career development, and he has spoken on these topics at design conferences worldwide.