The advisory team

Jared Spool (founder of UIE), Kim Goodwin (author of Designing for the Digital Age & former VP of Design at Cooper), AJ Hanneld (Graphic Designer), Christina Wodtke (lecturer at Stanford and co-founder of IIA), Lisa deBettencourt (co-founder of Pearl Partners & co-founder of IXDA), Sam Aquillano (Executive Director, Design Museum Foundation), Laura Klein (Principal at Users Know), Nick Finck (Distinguished Faculty at General Assembly, CXO at Craft & Rigor), Bob Baxley (former design director at Apple and Pinterest), Paolo Malabuyo (Director of UX at Google) and Abby Covert (author of How To Make Sense of Any Mess & Senior IA at Etsy).

The author

Scott Berkun (follow him here) is the author of seven books on business and culture, including Making Things Happen, The Myths of Innovation, Confessions of a Public Speaker and The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and The Future of Work. He studied design, computer science and philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, was the Design Evangelist & Training Manager at Microsoft, and was the leader of many design and engineering teams on consumer software products at Microsoft and WordPress.com, designing software and websites that have been used by millions of people.

His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired Magazine, Forbes, Wired, The Economist and other media. He’s a former contributor to Harvard Business and BusinessWeek, and has appeared often on CNBC, MSNBC, CNN and NPR for his expertise on various subjects. He gives 20 to 30 lectures a year around the world at major events, corporations and universities, often as the keynote speaker. He runs a popular blog with videos and essays, at www.scottberkun.com and tweets at @berkun.

For 20+ years Scott Berkun has been writing and speaking about good design. He’s presented his ideas, often as keynote lectures, at many prestigious design institutions and events including the AIGA (American Institute for Graphic Arts), IDSA (the Industrial Design Society of America), ASID (American society of Interior Designers), IXDA Seattle, UXPA Seattle, Puget Sound SIG-CHI, An Event Apart, User Interface Engineering, Adaptive Path’s MX UX, New Zealand’s Webstock, Australia’s Web Directions, Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University, Yale University, Northeastern University, and many others.

Berkun is also the lead organizer of Seattle UX Happy Hour, the city’s premier social club for professional designers (~3k members), a mentor through Hexagon UX, and the facilitator of the weekly Slack discussions for Clearleft’s Leading Design group (1100+ members).