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Steve Portigal
Steve is fascinated by the stuff of a culture – its products, companies, consumers, media, and advertising. All these artifacts and the relationships between them are the rules that define a culture -- the stuff makes the culture, but it is the culture that makes the stuff.
Steve has an informal Museum of Foreign Grocery Products, a fun diversion that celebrates cultural differences through mundane consumer goods.
Photography presents another "frame" on our surroundings and is an effective way to practice seeing the world differently. Steve takes pictures steadily, in his consulting work, travel, and as part of everyday life.
Steve built one of the first online communities (Undercover, a Rolling Stones fan group) in 1992, nurturing it from a time when the Internet was an underground academic technology through to today, as part of a global info-infrastructure.
Dan Soltzberg
Dan brings a background in design, facilitation, anthropology and communications to his work at Portigal Consulting.
Dan’s ability to “go deep” in his investigations supports a focus on generating provocative, actionable ideas, and creating processes and tools that empower client teams throughout the project lifecycle and beyond.
As a consultant and facilitator, Dan has worked with cross-functional and cross-cultural teams across a wide variety of industries and organization types.
Dan’s other loves include skateboarding and snowboarding, playing the bass, dogs, and old objects.
Past Speaking Engagements
- About, With, and For at the Institute of Design (2002 - 2005; 2004 slides here)
- Adobe Systems (2005) - the challenges
- Creative CanUX (2005) - seminar on ethnographic methods
- DUX05 poster - user research for the HP Home Cinema Digital Projector (PDF link to paper)
- DUX05 tutorial - innovation, ethnography and improv
- EPIC2005 workshop - interpersonal connections in ethnographic fieldwork
- IDSA-SF (2005) - facilitated panel discussion on design entrepreneurship
- BayCHI - Building Meaning Into Products in 1998 and Kawaii: Adventures in a Parallel Universe in 2004
- CHIFOO (2004) - innovation, ethnography and improv
- eBay (2004) - Global User Experience & Design Summit (review)
- Fisher-Price (2004) - Design Summit
- IDSA Western District Conference (2004) - facilitated panel discussions on i) design stories and ii) radical changes in our world
- IFL - Swedish Institute of Management (2003, 2004) - Beyond Market Research
- LIMA Licensing Trade Show (2004) - facilitated panel discussion on trends
- Masterfoods (2004) - R&D Excellence Week
- PDMA-SoCal (2004) - Learning about Customers, Demystified
- SF-AMA (2004) - international ethnography
- Art Center College of Design (2003) - introduction to ethnographic methods
- DUX03 (with Lynn Shade) - international ethnography (PDF link to paper)
- FX/PAL (2003) - Beyond Market Research
- Google (2003) - Designer Tea Time
- IBM Make IT Easy (2003) - Discovering Customer Value
- Institute of Design (2003) - international ethnography
- Thought At Work (2003) at the Rochester Institute of Technology (review here) - introduction to design research
- Chemical Senses Day (2002) - introduction to ethnographic methods
- Shure (2000) - training in ethnographic methods
- Stanford Design Program (1998 - 2000) - lecture on ethnographic methods
- Stanford Graduate School of Business (1996) - lecture on building usable products
Writing
- FreshMeat - the semi-regular column about culture, design, business, and technology
- The Museum of Foreign Groceries (PDF link) - some highlights from the collection
- Letter from Asia - cultural and design observations from our trip to Hong Kong, Bangkok, and India
- Shopping for Innovation: What you need to know before hiring a design firm (with Niti Bhan)
- Total Recall: Looking Back at 2004? - trying to look backwards when we are overwhelmed with experiences
- The More The Merrier - how technology (and culture) is bringing participation even further into product creation
- an analysis of the Japanese product Meary
- blogging about design and innovation at Core77
- blogging about design, culture, research, business, society, ephemera, media and more at All That ChittahChattah
- Design as a Cultural Activity in the SIGCHI Bulletin
- What's the Story? in LiNE Zine's special issue on Organizational Readiness in Turbulent Times
- Turn Signals, a fax-distributed (pre-blog) zine of current events, business, and culture (PDF sample here)
Press
- Design an “Experience” for Users - NIKKEI ELECTRONICS January 28, 2008 vol. 970
- iLines: The sleek, smooth design of Apple's iPod is now mirrored in the architecture of some of the company's high-profile stores - Boston Globe, June 29, 2006
- The Cradle Will Rock - Boston Globe, June 8, 2006
- Ethnography Is The New Core Competence, BusinessWeek INside Innovation, June 2006
- Cheap Thrills: Its prices are just one way IKEA is altering how America decorates - Boston Globe, November 3, 2005
- Grocery strikers' difficulties mount - Ventura County Star, January 18, 2004
- Online Diary - New York Times, December 4, 2003
- All Eyes On Japan's Latest Trend - Wireless Flash News, November 11, 2002
Other
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