David Gilmore: David has been studying people’s use of technology products for over 20 years. As far back as 1995 he was wondering whether usability was the right metric, since it tends to focus too much on the micro-level of analysis and not the macro (the tasks rather than the activity). More recently he has found himself confronting not only the question of usefulness, but also of value, due to products that were clearly useful, but turned out not to be valuable enough for people to buy them.
Gilbert Cockton: Gilbert is Research Chair in HCI at the University of Sunderland in the north east of England. He currently leads usability work in the Digital Knowledge Exchange, a knowledge transfer project. Gilbert also leads work on usability method comparison in the European COST Action MAUSE (Maturity of USability Engineering). As a Fellow of both the Royal Society for the Arts, and the British Computer Society, Gilbert served in many roles within the international HCI community, including Vice-Chair of IFIP TC13 (2004-06), Chair of British HCI Group (2001-2004), and Chair of ACM CHI 2003 and BCS HCI 2000 Conferences. Gilbert is currently a UK NESTA fellow, developing an integrated framework of methods and resources for worth/value-centred development. The background to this work appears in NordiCHI 2004 (keynote), CHI 2004 and 2005 (short papers), and alt.chi 2007.
Sari Kujala: Sari is a professor of psychology at the Institute of Human-Centered Technology, Tampere University of Technology, Finland. Her research work has focused on field studies, user involvement and user needs and requirements elicitation for the last ten years. Sari got interested in value-centred design when she observed that users and developers have different preferences and values and placing developers near users increases their understanding of the users’ values. These findings are discussed in her latest journal article to be published in Behaviour and Information Technology. Sari Kujala’s current research interests focus on value-centred design in a research project called VALU (Tools for Identifying Users’ needs and Values in Designing Successful Technology Products).
Elizabeth Churchill: Elizabeth is a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research. Originally a psychologist by training, for the past 15 years she has drawn on diverse areas to consider how to design effective communication situations– both face to face and technologically mediated. Influences on her work include psychology, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, architecture and film studies. Until 2006 she worked at PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, California. Before that she was the project lead of the Social Computing Group at FX Palo Laboratory, Fuji Xerox’s research lab in Palo Alto. In late 2006 she joined Yahoo! Research to develop an initiative in Media Experience Research.
Austin Henderson: Austin’s 40-year career in Human-Computer Interaction includes user interface research and architecture at Bolt Beranek and Newman, Xerox research (both PARC and EuroPARC) and Apple Computer, and strategic industrial design with Fitch. Currently, Austin is Director of Knowledge Management in the Advanced Concepts & Technology group of Pitney Bowes. His research interests are in the areas of the design of systems that can be collaboratively evolved by users, and the management of the integration of research and development in corporations. Austin has been active in ACM/SIGCHI for over 20 years. Austin has been interested in bringing value to users in a number of ways: through end-user toolkits where users can define their own systems, through better systems design through user-centered design and participatory design, and through corporations seeking to maximize value to to the stockholders through providing value to the users of their products.
Monty Hammontree: Monty is currently serving as the Director of User Experience for Microsoft’s developer tools division. He is a leading member of Microsoft’s corporate wide User Experience Leadership Team through which he helps drive storming, norming, and forming for its entire user experience community. A primary thread that has run throughout his 20 year career in product design and user research management is the development and utilization of team-based techniques for uncovering user value delivery opportunities, exploring creative concepts, visualizing solution alternatives, and evaluating/refining candidate solutions. In this regard he has helped develop a variety of tools and techniques for uncovering, visualizing, and evaluating user value delivery opportunities that are in use at Microsoft today.