Speakers
UX London presenters represent the cream of user experience practitioners worldwide. By attending, you will gain the wisdom of years of experience from this amazing cast of engaging speakers and effective teachers.
Bill Buxton
Bill Buxton is a relentless advocate for innovation, design, and - especially - the appropriate consideration of human values, capacity, and culture in the conception, implementation, and use of new products and technologies.
This is reflected in his research, teaching, talks, and writing - including his column on design and innovation for Business Week, and his 2007 book, Sketching User Experiences.
In December 2005, he was appointed Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Prior to that, he was Principal of his own Toronto-based boutique design and consulting firm, Buxton Design.
Buxton began his career as a composer and performer, having done a Bachelor of Music degree at Queen's University. He then studied and taught for two years at the Institute of Sonology, Utrecht, Holland.
In 1975 Bill started designing his own digital musical instruments. This is what led him to the University of Toronto, where he completed an MSc in Computer Science, joined the faculty, and is still an adjunct professor. It is also the path that brought him into the field of human-computer interaction, which is his technical area of specialty.
From 1987-89, Buxton was in Cambridge England, helping establish a new satellite of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (EuroPARC). From 1989-94 he split his time between Toronto, where he was Scientific Director of the Ontario Telepresence Project, and Palo Alto, California, where he was a consulting researcher at Xerox PARC.
From 1994 until December 2002, he was Chief Scientist of Alias|Wavefront, (now part of Autodesk) and from 1995, its parent company SGI Inc. In the fall of 2004, he became a part-time instructor in the Department of Industrial Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design. In 2004/05 he was also Visiting Professor at the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) at the University of Toronto. He currently splits his time between Redmond and Toronto.
In 1995, Buxton became the third recipient of the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society Award for contributions to research in computer graphics and human-computer interaction. In 2000 he was given the New Media Visionary of the Year Award at the Canadian New Media Awards. In 2001, The Hollywood Reporter named him one of the 10 most influential innovators in Hollywood. In 2002, Time Magazine named him one of the top 5 designers in Canada. Also in 2002, he was elected to the CHI Academy. In October, 2005, he and Gord Kurtenbach received the “Lasting Impact Award”, from ACM UIST 2005, which was awarded for their 1991 paper, Issues in Combining Marking and Direct Manipulation Techniques. In 2008 he became the 10th recipient of the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award, “for fundamental contributions to the field of Computer Human Interaction.” In 2009 he was elected Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), for his contributions to the field of human-computer interaction.
Bill Buxton will be presenting On Long Noses, Sampling, Synthesis, Design and Innovation.
On Long Noses, Sampling, Synthesis, Design and Innovation
It is kind of ironic that one of the areas where one finds the least creativity and innovation is in discourses on creativity and innovation. I sometimes wonder – especially when it comes to technology and UX design, if this is because we seem burdened by the assumption that answers somehow need to be complex. Perhaps much of what we seek is sitting right in front of us, and while looking directly at it, we are doing so with the wrong eyes.
