Jeremy Alexis is a senior lecturer and the assistant dean at the IIT Institute of Design. He holds both a Bachelor of Architecture and a Master of Design from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He currently teaches classes on economics and design, concept evaluation, design decision making, and problem framing.  Before joining the Institute of Design as a full-time faculty member, Jeremy worked for Doblin, gravitytank, and Archideas.  He has worked with clients such as Unilever, Motorola, Citibank, Pfizer, American Express, Target Corporation, and Zebra Technologies.

Courses taught in 2010-2011:
Analysis
Concept Evaluation
Decision Making
Problem Framing
Synthesis
Understanding Context

Laura Forlano is assistant professor of design at IIT Institute of Design.  From 2009-2011, she was a postdoctoral associate in the Interaction Design Lab in the Departments of Communication and Information Science at Cornell University.  Laura’s research is on the role of information technology in supporting open innovation networks in urban environments with a specific emphasis on the use of mobile, wireless, and ubiquitous computing technologies to support collaboration.  Her current project, “Design Collaborations as Sociotechnical Systems,” which is funded by the National Science Foundation, is an international comparative study that focuses on the role of technology in supporting networks of designers in New York, Barcelona and Brisbane.  Forlano received a 2011-2012 Fulbright grant to study social innovation networks in Toronto.  Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, Microsoft Research, the Urban Communication Foundation, and the American Council on Germany. She is co-editor with Marcus Foth, Christine Satchell, and Martin Gibbs of From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement, which is to be published by MIT Press in 2011. Her research and writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals including The Information Society, Journal of Community Informatics, IEEE Pervasive Computing, Design Issues, and Science and Public Policy. She has published chapters for books including editor Mark Shepard’s Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space (MIT Press 2011) and The Architecture League of New York’s Situated Technologies pamphlet series and is a regular contributor to their Urban Omnibus blog. Laura received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University in 2008. Her dissertation, “When Code Meets Place: Collaboration and Innovation at WiFi Hotspots,” explores the intersection between organizations, technology (in particular, mobile and wireless technology) and the role of place in communication, collaboration and innovation.

Laura received a master’s in international affairs from Columbia University, a diploma in international relations from The Johns Hopkins University, and a bachelor’s in Asian studies from Skidmore College. She studied at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan from 1993-4. Forlano speaks Japanese and has studied French, Spanish, Italian, and German. Laura’s blog can be found at http://www.lauraforlano.org.

Vijay Kumar leads the strategic design planning and the design methods programs at the IIT Institute of Design. He also leads his consulting firm based in Chicago. He was the chief methodologist at Doblin Inc., a strategic innovation planning consulting firm based in Chicago, for more than 12 years.

With over 27 years of global work experience, Kumar has taught, published, and lectured throughout the world about how to use structured methods, tools, and frameworks for conceiving reliable human-centered innovations and turning them into strategic plans for organizations. His research is focused on framing emerging innovation opportunities in education, health care, communication, retail, social reform, and emerging markets, among others.

He is the inventor of many methods, tools, and frameworks designed to uncover unexplored innovation opportunities. Students, researchers, consultants, and business executives around the world have been successfully using some of his tools, such as Analysis and Transformations (A&T), Insight Matrix, and Innovation Landscape, for many years.

He consults with companies and organizations around the world for planning innovations using systemic, structured, and user-centered methods. He has consulted with Alamo, Amoco, Autodesk, Bose, Hallmark, Kraft Foods, Lenscrafters, McDonald’s, Motorola, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Shell, SAS Airlines, Steelcase, Target, Texas Instruments, T-Mobile, and Wells Fargo.

Kumar is a frequent speaker and is widely published on the topic of innovation. His recent speaking engagements include the Design Thinking Summit 2010 in Singapore, the 2010 AllWorld Summit – Expanding the Global Economy at Harvard University, and the Institute of Design Strategy Conference in Chicago. He also regularly conducts executive workshops for organizations in Asia, Europe, North America, and South America.

Courses taught in 2010-2011:
Design Analysis
Design Synthesis
Planning Research Workshop
Planning Workshop

Anijo Mathew is an assistant professor at IIT Institute of Design in Chicago. Anijo’s research interests include interactive (computer-mediated) spaces, immersive/responsive environments, environmental behavior, and prototyping at the fuzzy front end of the design process. After earning a BArch from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi (India), he went on to complete an MDesS from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Prior to joining ID, he was a tenure track assistant professor at Mississippi State University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Design (CAAD) where he taught in the graduate program and led the interaction design track at the Design Research and Informatics Lab (DRIL). He is currently working on a PhD exploring the intersection of computing and design with Yvonne Rogers and Peter Lloyd at the Open University in the U.K.

His research falls within two broad categories - one a scholarship of pedagogy: looking at various methods and design mechanisms for the process of design including prototyping in the early stages of design, and the other a scholarship of research: evaluating new semantic appropriations of architecture (place) as enabled by new technologies. At ID he teaches interaction design and communication design workshops in addition to several IxD and communication related courses. Student projects from his workshops have been installed on Chicago's State Street, published in international conferences such as IASDR, CHI, ACADIA, and DCA, and recognized by IxDA and IDEO.

In 2007 the Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) selected him as their New Researcher of the Year for 2006-07. His work has been published in conferences such as ACADIA, CHI, CSCW, Creativity and Cognition, and ARCC, among others. His research work has led to experience design for Chicago events such as Art Loop Open, placemaking on State Street, and recognized by PSFK. He has served as a design chair for CHI 2009 and 2010, the premier conference of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)'s Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI). He currently serves on the board of directors of the Association of Computing Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA), the Digital Task Force of the Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF), and he is a member of the Placemaking Advisory Board of the Chicago Loop Alliance. He has worked with and/or conducted research in the area of technology and place with the Chicago Tribune, Broadway in Chicago, Chicago Loop Alliance, Gensler, Motorola Mobility, Chicago Artists Coalition, and the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

You can visit his personal website as well as d ownload his current CV.

Courses taught in 2010-2011:
Communication Workshop
Interaction Research Workshop
Prototyping Interactions
Prototyping Methods
Ubiquitous Computing

Stan Ruecker is an associate professor with current research interests in the areas of humanities visualization, the future of reading, and information design. He comes to ID from the University of Alberta’s interdisciplinary humanities computing program where he was also an associate professor, supervising graduate students and leading seminars on experimental interface design, knowledge management and analysis, research methods, interdisciplinary research project management, and critical discourse analysis. His students have gone on to work with major research and development projects in fields ranging from medical imaging to oilfield decision support.

He is a major grant holder, and his research teams have presented their findings at over one hundred international conferences in design, computing science, educational technology, literature, communication technology, library and information studies, and humanities computing. He was the principal investigator of the SSHRC SRG Humanities Visualization team, and he currently leads the interface design unit of the SSHRC MCRI Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project.

His work to date has focused on developing prototypes to support the hermeneutic or interpretive process, and he has published extensively on interdisciplinary project management, text encoding theory, affective design, interaction histories, electronic books, information design, issue crawling, and experimental interface design. His book Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage, co-authored by Milena Radzikowska and Stéfan Sinclair, was released in 2011 by Ashgate Press.

Stan holds an interdisciplinary PhD in humanities computing from University of Alberta, an MDes from the same, an MA in English literature from University of Toronto, and advanced undergraduate degrees in English literature and computer science from University of Regina. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Alberta’s School of Library and Information Studies and in the University of Victoria’s Humanities Division.

Martin Thaler is a visiting associate professor at the IIT Institute of Design.  He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Royal College of Art and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design.  For the past 12 years he has led multidisciplinary teams at the IDEO Chicago office for companies in the consumer electronics, medical, and furniture industries.

His work for clients including Motorola, Lilly, Steelcase, Baxter, DaimlerChrysler, Gateway, McDonald’s, and Nanosphere have resulted in designs that successfully blend user, technology, and business needs.  Prior to joining IDEO in 1985, he co-founded the award-winning consulting firm Design Logic in Chicago.  His clients included Bang & Olufsen, Dictaphone, and View-Mater.  Martin’s work has been exhibited and been published in books and periodicals including ID, Blueprint, Casa Vogue, and Time.

Martin has taught product design and environmental design as an ID adjunct faculty member over the past 16 years.  He is keenly interested in the fundamentals of design.  Martin is committed to providing students with real-world opportunities in hospitals, schools, businesses, and other institutions from which they can experience how design can make a difference in people’s lives.

Courses taught in 2010-2011:
Graduate Introduction to Product Design
Product Design Workshop
Prototyping Methods
Prototyping Products