Designer Technologist Meet Up
The process of designing a great experience and physically building a great experience have begun to merge. This shift radically changes the fundamental roles of designers and technologists. Today, we iteratively build towards a vision, often by including the user on this journey, without any real sense of a 'finish line'. These overlapping roles between design and technology encourage building early and often, especially amid conceptual ambiguity, to test concepts and frameworks and identifying what breaks and what survives. I will examine the skills needed in the modern designer's wheelhouse to embrace this movement. And I will look at how we can shape the conversation between design and engineering so these disciplines can create a different model of product development.
Presenters
Jai Dandekar
Sr Interaction Designer
frog
Jai is a user experience designer with a background in graphic and media design, an expertise in interaction design, and a passion for infusing narrative into large, complex systems. Raised in Davis, CA, Jai is naturally curious, driven to keep learning, and always open to spending an hour or two digging through back issues of his favorite super heroes at the local comic book store.
His past experience includes constructing transmedia storytelling experiences in the graduate media design program at Art Center College of Design, tackling information and interaction obstacles within financial software at CQG, and reinventing e-commerce for the online shopper at eBay.
He currently is working as a senior interaction designer for the product strategy and design firm, frog design, in Austin, TX.
Randall Elliott
Sr Design Technologist
frog
Randall, sprang up as a Chicago burb-kid, now swimming in Austin over 12 years. The school he was hatched into, included family members focused on technology, art and architecture. It was not long before the “air he breathed” was the connection between art, design and architecture.
As a professional, he continued to submerge himself in these themes including: setting afloat his own swelling success of a creative company, helping spearhead global social media teams, spawning a pinnacle social shopping experience and casting a music/arts community from paper to screen. Randall has over a decade of tidal wave-creating for brands like Morningstar Financial, PayPal, Cisco, Dell, AT&T, Disney and Microsoft. He is a sponge, for new information and learning, scanning hundreds of blog feeds daily.
Randall found his home in the creative "pond" at frog design as a Senior Design Technologist where he rapidly prototypes and simulates complex interactions leading to better design decisions.
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