Part 1: The Interface Parenthesis

Stefan is a principal interaction designer at Cooper. In this role he’s focused on evolving the practice of design, exploring new ways of working, leading engagements, and pushing for courageous, disruptive approaches in the solutions developed for clients. His experience ranges over a diverse set of domains consumer experience, finance, learning, with a deep interest and portfolio of medical work. He’s helped cardiac surgeons support the hearts of their patients, expatriates file taxes, doctors and nurses quickly and easily record their patient notes, and insurance underwriters understand the risks of catastrophe for a given market. He teaches the practice and method of design for Cooper U, and advises Rock Health start-ups in how to bring their ideas to market.

In his day job as a Director at Cooper, Chris designs products, services, and strategy for a variety of domains, including health, financial, and consumer. In prior experience he has developed interactive kiosks and spaces for museums, helped to visualize the future of counter-terrorism, built prototypes of coming technologies for Microsoft, and designed telehealth devices to accommodate the crazy facts of modern healthcare.

His spidey sense goes off about random topics, and this has led him to speak at conferences about a wide range of things including interactive narrative, ethnographic user research, interaction design, sex-related interactive technologies, free-range learning, and, most recently, the relationship between science fiction and interface design. Chris was one of the founding graduates of the now-passing-into-legend Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy, where his grad thesis was a service design for lifelong learners called Fresh.