Meet our newest keynote speaker: Parc’s Mike Kuniavsky

Due to health issues, Mike is no longer able to fly and had to cancel his 2016 talk.

 UX in the Era of Smart Things
} Time: TBD / 45 MINUTES

The Internet of Things is challenging user experience design practice in a fundamental way. Screen-based design is giving way to the convergence of service design, industrial design and artificial intelligence with the already-uneasy cluster of disciplines grouped under UX. Many seemingly esoteric issues—some going back to the discussions of cyberneticists in the 1950s—are increasingly relevant, while design automation erodes traditional visual and interaction design concerns. This tectonic shift changes the methods UX designers use, the tools we need, and the boundaries of the discipline itself. And just as the singular hero object has given way to the dynamic, responsive design system, the era of the lone hero designer is well and clearly over. UX in the IoT era is a process that produces systems, practiced by interdisciplinary teams.

In this talk I want to outline a view of the ecosystem of interlocking challenges created by IoT UX, from business models, to design methods and tools. There will be more questions than answers, but hopefully some hints at answers, too.

 Speaker Bio: Mike Kuniavsky

San Francisco’s Mike Kunivasky, a long-time IoT UX expert, is a Principal Scientist in the Innovation Services group at PARC (formerly Xerox PARC), where he works with Fortune 50 companies on their innovation strategy, IoT ecosystems and on how to reduce their risk of adopting novel technologies through the use of user experience design.

A twenty-year plus veteran of digital product development, Mike designs products, business processes, and services at the leading edge of technological change. Along the way he co-founded ThingM and Adaptive Path, and founded Wired Digital’s User Experience Lab. Mike is also a maker: from installation and Burning Man art projects to Blink(1), an IOT notification light that works with nearly any device.

Mike is the author of “Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research” and “Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design” both of which are used as standard university textbooks. He has also contributed to a number of other books, including the encyclopedic “HCI Handbook” (2007 edition), and his articles regularly appear in industry publications.

Mike specializes in multi-device interactions, cloud-based service design, and design of hardware products connected to cloud-based services. His background includes design for social analytics, consumer electronics, appliances, image retrieval, RGB LEDs, and financial services. He has worked with some of the world’s top technology companies, such as Samsung, Sony, Nokia, Whirlpool, and Qualcomm, to design new products, guide product strategy, and create user-centered design and development cultures.

Back in the day, Mike designed the user interface of HotBot, a popular early search engine. He also happens to be the fourth Adaptive Path co-founder following Lane Becker (2009), Jesse James Garrett (2013) and Peter Merholz (2015) making an appearance on the CanUX stage.

For more info, you can follow Mike on on Twitter @mikekuniavsky

*Image credit: Core77