Matt Nish-Lapidus joins our 2015 lineup

We’re thrilled Matt is making the trip to Ottawa for CanUX 2015.

What is Beautiful Software?
Nov 8, 2015   12:30pm / 25 MINUTES

Amazing design results start with a solid design practice. Over the last hundred or so years designers and design educators have established a foundation of skills, theory, and principles that give us a way of thinking about, talking about, and doing design. Beginning with an overview of traditional design foundations from graphic design, industrial design, and architecture, this session will explore the evolution of the language of design as it tries to keep up with modern design practice and the types of things that designers are working on in the 21st century.

How can we describe the beauty, aesthetic values, and ethics of something that impacts the quality of our lives but we can’t see, like a social network. Design’s traditional critical language doesn’t adequately account for the aesthetic properties of these new kinds of design outputs and practices. We will explore a possible new framing and critical language that extends tradition and works to evolve how we think about, and do, design in the age of the network.

Speaker Bio: Matt Nish-Lapidus

Matt is a Partner and Design Director at Normative in Toronto, where he focuses on design practice development in a 21st century studio. He is also the Vice President of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), a global organization dedicated to the advancement of the interaction design practice.

Matt has a rich background as a practicing designer, musician, and artist. His work has included everything from the digital library catalog in use by the New York Public Library to enterprise software for hospitals, video games, and large-scale public installations. He spent the first few years of his career assisting international new media artists such as Stelarc, David Rokeby, and Haruki Nishijima, while developing his own art and design practice.

Along with leading a team at Normative, Matt also teaches Interaction Design at Sheridan College and was involved with the original Banff-based CanUX events when he was working at nForm. Matt holds a degree in new media art from Ryerson University. And he happens to like arguing. And the finer points of science fiction.

You can follow Matt on Twitter @emenel

*Image credit: Matt Nish-Lapidus