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Innovation Labs

2008

2006: Mentors

Matt Marsh
Firsthand Experience
Matt is the founder of firsthand. He offers user centred design strategy, interdisciplinary program management, end user participation programs, user needs research, experience prototyping and supplies other human factors expertise to projects. Matt works primarily in the foresight and conceptualisation phases of design and development where he ensures that human requirements are placed at the heart of the design, planning, and tendering activities. He serves on the Ergonomics Society Professional Affairs board and on the advisory committee for the Red Room Theatre Company.
Matt will be mentoring at the North-West, Yorkshire and London Labs

Tracy Currer
Interaction Design Consultant
Tracy has over twelve years of experience in designing interactions for people with products, spaces, systems and organisations. Throughout her career, Tracy has worked with diverse clients, from start-ups to large global corporations, to identify opportunities for innovation and design. Whilst balancing the requirements of business and technology, she delivers engaging experiences with clear and efficient use that meet the needs and desires of real people. After working at IDEO Product Development for eight years she became an independent design consultant. Integrating the practice of graphic information design with interaction design, Tracy works with clients to facilitate the communication, design and development of their ideas. Tracy is an award winning designer and named inventor on eight patents.
Tracy will be mentoring at the Yorkshire Lab

Rachel Jones
Instrata
Rachel has over 15 years experience applying a variety of customer-centred techniques to new technology design. Rachel founded Instrata in 2001 to bring together a team of multidisciplinary individuals with the common aim of involving people in the design of technology. Rachel has worked at the two foremost pioneers of customer-centred techniques in design, Xerox EuroPARC and Sapient (formerly E-lab). Rachel has a PhD is Computer Studies, over 20 international publications and authored 10 patents.
Rachel will be mentoring at the Yorkshire Lab

Nico Macdonald
Spy [writing] [facilitation]
Nico Macdonald writes about, programmes events on, and researches in the area of design, technology and innovation. He writes for publications including Guardian Technology, BBC News Online, the RSA Journal, Creative Review, The Register, silicon.com, and the Online Journalism Review, and is author of ‘What is Web Design?’ (RotoVision, 2003). He wrote and maintains the Interaction Design element of the Design Council’s About Design resource. He co-programmed the major conferences ‘Designing the Internet’ (1996) and ‘Design For Usability’ (2000), and founded and continues to programme the Experience Design forum in London. His research projects include the DtI Technology Programme-funded Building Awareness for Enhanced Workplace Performance, investigating the use of wireless sensor networks, and the Internet Development Map, which seeks to visually explain the factors and dynamics that shaped the innovation that is the Internet.
Nico will be mentoring at the North-West and London Labs

Kathleen Holman
Director, PhunQube
Kathleen Holman is a director at phunQube where she leads the usability, research and user-centred design services. She has 17 years of experience, split evenly between products and web services. She has designed telephones, ticket machines, consumer electronics products, gaming devices and software. Most recently she has designed highly-functional web services such as UK exams administration tools, car configurators, diet calculators, application processes and searchable content sites. Most of her work has been taken to market and much of it still in use. She has a commercial focus and specializes in real life design issues and taking things through to the detail and final implementation. She also worked at Zentropy/MRM, IDEO, and Philips Design.
Kathleen will be mentoring at the London Lab

Nick Durrant
Co-founder, PLOT
Nick Durrant has worked in interaction design for over a decade. After several years in Silicon Valley, via Taligent, IBM, and 280 Inc. developing group, collaboration environment, and social software such as ‘Places for project teams’ and ‘Meeting Centre’ he returned to the UK to bring interaction design strategy to Metadesign, Icon MediaLab and Futurebrand Digital. Client work at from this time includes research, strategy and design for Bristol Legible City , Orange, Skoda, Bosch, Telia, GSK, MSDW, Bank of America, Artranspennine 98, Netaid UN/Cisco, Telefonica, Lastminute.com, UPC/Chello, and Peoplecom. Bristol Legible City won an environmental design effectiveness award and is widely held up as a best-practise example in urban design. His design research projects include ‘The bubble engine – Net Archaeologies, Web Geographies, and Active Networking – Issue Network Mapping at the Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, in 1999, and FLIRT, location-based recreational media, at the RCA and Helsinki in 1998. More recently Nick is a ‘Visiting Professor’ to Interbrand, has been an ‘Agent Provocateur’ for Orange, and an ongoing Advisor to, and Mentor for, the Design Council’s Humanising Technology project. He graduated from the Computer Related Design programme at the Royal College of Art in 1994. He is a co-founder of Plot, and is enthusiastic for conversations, cooking, the future, everyday life, wayfinding, cities and spaces.
Nick will be mentoring at the North-West and London Labs

Gill Wildman
Co-founder, PLOT
Gill’s passion is the design of people-centred systems. Gill believes businesses and other organisations need to realise the value of both end-user participation and interdisciplinary collaboration to succeed with their innovation strategies and design initiatives. Her early work, as a researcher and developer of local services, used the community development approach, which emphasises linking local networks and agencies to user-needs. This was amplified and extended by the pioneering use of social visualisations, and other design methods. Later, expanding on these practices as a designer, then as a strategic design management consultant.
The Humanising Technology initiative for the Design Council introduced user-centred design approaches to early-stage UK technology start-ups and brokered collaborations between many talented designers and scientists.
Gill has also worked within academic arenas – as Assistant Director of the Design, Strategy and Innovation MA at Brunel Uni, as an Industry board member for Innovative Product Design and Interactive Media Design at Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee, and with new forms of collaboration through Innovation RCA and the Innovation at Imperial College.
She is co-founder of Plot, an agency using design and innovation approaches to generate powerful value propositions in both large and small private and public sector organisations. She is currently researching the affordances of RFID.
Gill will be mentoring at the North-West and London Labs