TEDxSoMa

Jason Tester’s interests in interactive technology began the old-fashioned way, tinkering one-on-one with the equipment he had at hand. With his work on technological voting, however, he saw the possible effects of computer-human interaction on the future of society as a whole.

At IFTF, Jason focuses on three areas: research into how people use emerging technologies, the application of design to futures research, and facilitating groups to stimulate insights and implications about the future. Jason strives to look beneath the surface of society and its artifacts for hidden layers of meaning.

Jason has long been interested in researching and designing the ways people interact with technology, expertise he brought to IFTF’s ongoing effort to broaden the ways in which its findings are visualized and presented. To this end, he developed one of IFTF’s current methodologies called “artifacts from the future.” Most recently, he has been interested in moving futures thinking out of the think tanks and into the street by developing a platform called human–future interaction. Such a platform is designed to make futures thinking part of daily life by using immersive experiences and new media tools to provoke and capture citizens’ thoughts about the future.

Before IFTF, Jason was in the founding class at the Interactive Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy, where he undertook the “Accelerated Democracy” project, a series of scenarios that uniquely illustrate potential future—positive and negative—for technological voting. This project has been widely featured in the press and formed the basis of his focus on new methods for integrating design with long-term futures research. When he was at Stanford, Jason helped found the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, the only research and design group focused on the new field of persuasive technologies—technologies that influence users’ thoughts or activities as they use them.

Jason holds a B.S. in human–computer interaction design from Stanford University, and a master’s degree from the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy.

David Pescovitz – BoingBoing.net and MAKE

David Pescovitz is co-editor of the popular weblog BoingBoing.net and also editor-at-large for MAKE:, the DIY technology magazine. Pescovitz co-wrote the book Reality Check (HardWired, 1996), based on his long-running futurist column in Wired magazine where he remains a correspondent. He has also written for Scientific American, Popular Science, New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, and New Scientist, among many other publications. In 2002, he won the Foresight Prize in Communication, recognizing excellence in educating the public and research community about nanotechnology and other emerging technologies. Pescovitz holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Electronic Media from the University of Cincinnati and a Master’s in Journalism from UC Berkeley.
Pescovitz has also contributed to the Los Angeles Times, IEEE Spectrum, Industry Standard, Spin, MTV Online, Discovery Channel Online, and Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. His writings on technology and culture are featured in the books What Are You Optimistic About? (Harper, 2007), The Happy Mutant Handbook (Riverhead, 1996), and The ‘Zine Reader (Holt, 1997). In 1996, Pescovitz created Nrrrd, a critically acclaimed technology and youth culture Web site for Turner Entertainment. Pescovitz is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Science and has appeared on numerous television and radio programs and networks including CNN’s Sonya Live, NPR, Fox News, ZDTV, and CNET.

Jeff Lawson – Twilio

Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, has over 10 years of entrepreneurial leadership experience. Most recently, Lawson served as Product Manager for Amazon Web Services, leading the development of high-growth Software-As-A-Service offerings for the Internet retailer. He was also co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of sports retailer Nine Star, founding Chief Technology Officer of online ticketing exchange Stubhub.com, and founder and Chief Executive Officer of Versity.com. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Michigan, where he studied Computer Science and Film.

Christopher Willits – Artist, Teacher, & Founder/Director of overlap.org

Christopher Willits creates patterns of vibrations with sound and light. He occupies a unique corner of the electronic-art-music universe—hovering above the intersection of electronic production’s nuts and bolts, new media art, and a wide-open creative mind. “i am a conduit of the process, a kind of gardener,” he says. “I simply imagine, intuit, respond and do the work laid before me.” Willits’ tireless responding and doing and working has produced 20 albums in 10 years—solo and in collaboration with artists including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Matmos, Zach Hill, and Taylor Deupree—and an organic, multi-faceted sound that expands like the vines of an electro-acoustic kudzu plant. Christopher Willits is a teacher, a label owner (the experimental hub Overlap.org), a meditator, a tech geek, a visual/new media artist, and virtuosic musician in one. In other words, there’s no one out there quite like him.

Willits designs much of his own software, and his music is a holistic universe in which all elements are interconnected; he folds his guitar lines into bleary, unrecognizable shapes and polyrhythmic textures, adding strokes of percussion, horns, and his own voice until the whole glows with an earthly inner light. Willits completed his Master’s Degree in Electronic Music at Mills College where he studied with Pauline Oliveros and Fred Frith. At Mills he explored structure-generating processes in music; a focus not unfamiliar to former Mills affiliates John Cage and Steve Reich. Prior to Mills, Willits focused on painting, video art, sound art and music at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Jeffrey Betcher – Quesada Gardens

Jeffrey Betcher lives and works in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood. He is a community organizer and writer with social policy experience at the national level. He advocates for strengthening local systems, especially social systems, and for prioritizing community-building as a primary social change strategy. He co-founded and leads the award-winning Quesada Gardens Initiative, in the heart of Bayview, and organizes Bayview Footprints, a network of informal community-building groups building social cohesion and telling a positive story about a maligned neighborhood.

Jeffrey expresses the same commitment to local systems and community values in the private sector. His company, YamStreet, is in development as a values-driven apparel business modeling local production and applied technology. He is President of peopleWear SF, an apparel industry trade association working to reinvigorate the industry by emphasizing local, sustainable practices.

Dev Patnaik – Jump Associates

Dev Patnaik is the CEO of Jump Associates, one of America’s premier growth strategy firms. Together with his teammates, Dev works with companies to create new businesses and reinvent existing ones. Jump has helped to define profitable growth platforms in highly ambiguous spaces, as well as build the systems, processes and metrics to actually make it happen. In recent years, Jump has become particularly known for its pioneering culture, and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top workplaces in America.

Dev is a trusted advisor to senior executives at many of America’s most admired companies, including GE, Nike, Target and Hewlett-Packard. A frequent speaker at business forums, Dev has been featured as a guest on the CNBC series, “The Business of Innovation.” His articles on innovation and strategy have appeared in numerous publications including BusinessWeek, Fast Company and Forbes. Dev is the author of the book Wired to Care: How Companies prosper when they create widespread empathy.

When he’s not working at Jump, Dev is an adjunct professor at Stanford University. Since 1999, Dev has taught a course called Needfinding. In the class, students draw upon methods from anthropology, design and business strategy to discover insights about ordinary people and create new products and services.

These days, Dev is happiest when he’s spending time singing songs with his young daughter, Maya. Her preferences seem to range from My Fair Lady and Camptown Races to Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer.
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Nathan Shedroff – California College of the Arts

Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the ground-breaking MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, CA. This program prepares next-generation leaders with a vision of business as sustainable, meaningful, ethical, profitable, and truly innovative. The program unites the perspectives of systems thinking, integrative thinking, sustainability, and new tools for leadership into a holistic framework.

He is a pioneer in Experience Design, Interaction Design and Information Design, speaks and teaches internationally, and is a serial entrepreneur. His many books include: Experience Design 1.1, Making Meaning, Design is the Problem, and the upcoming Make It So.

He holds an MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School and a BS in Industrial Design from Art Center College of Design. He worked with Richard Saul Wurman at TheUnderstandingBusiness and, later, co-founded vivid studios, a decade-old pioneering company in interactive media and one of the first Web services firms on the planet. vivid’s hallmark was helping to establish and validate the field of information architecture, by training an entire generation of designers in the newly emerging Web industry.

Nathan spoke at TED6 and was nominated for a Chrysler Innovation in Design Award in 1994 and 1999 and a National Design Award in 2001. Learn more at .
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