Bill Buxton : 2010 Plenary Session

Regardless of the buzz words swirling around contemporary conversations about design - User Experience (UX), Design Thinking, Natural User Interface (NUI), etc. - one thing is increasingly clear: the pendulum has finally begun to swing from the techno-centric to the human-centric perspective. Not that it isn't sometimes swinging kicking and screaming, but swinging it is. And perhaps more to the point, as welcome baggage, it is bringing along with it methodologies and economic arguments, that may well mean that it stays there for a long while (with the odd trip back for nostalgia's sake). But even though we are in Rome, it does not follow that we all speak and think as Romans do. And that is the point of this talk - to cut through the jargon (which may simply be the "new black"), and help define this new space, and how we think, act, and create in this space.

Bill Buxton is the author of, Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design, published jointly by Morgan Kaufmann and Focal Press as well as a columnist on design and innovation for BusinessWeek.com. He is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and has a 30 year involvement in research, design and commentary around human aspects of technology, and digital tools for creative endeavour, including music, film and industrial design. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was a researcher at Xerox PARC, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Chief Scientist of Alias Research and SGI Inc. - where 2003 he was co-recipient of an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement. In 2007, he was named Doctor of Design, honoris causa, by the Ontario College of Art and Design, in 2008 became the 10^th recipient of the ACM/SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award for fundamental contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. In January 2009 was elected a Fellow of the ACM, in June was awarded a Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, by his alma mater, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, and in November was awarded an honourary doctorate in Industrial Design from the Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Finally, in 2010, BusinessWeek named Bill among the World's Most Influential Designers.

More information on Buxton and his work can be found at: www.billbuxton.com