Jon Kolko

Founder and Director of Austin Center for Design, an educational institution in Texas, Jon was previously a Professor of Interaction and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he was instrumental in shaping the Interaction and Industrial Design undergraduate and graduate programs. He has worked extensively in the professional world of interaction design, solving the problems of Fortune 500 clients. Jon’s work has encompassed the worlds of consumer electronics, mobile, Web, supply-chain management, demand planning, and customer-relationship management, and he has worked with clients such as AT&T, HP, Nielsen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Ford, IBM, Palm, and other leaders of the Global 2000. The underlying theme of these projects: the creation of solutions that are useful, usable, and desirable. Jon’s present research investigates the process of design, with a focus on design synthesis and the creation of meaning. Jon sits on the Board of Directors for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and is the Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine, an ACM publication. He is the author of the book Thoughts on Interaction Design, which was published by Morgan Kaufmann. In late 2010, Oxford University Press will publish his forthcoming book, Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis.