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dan-about-us-portrait-1.jpg		 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.

Connect with Steve: LinkedIn   Flickr   Twitter   FriendFeed   Dopplr

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.

Connect with Dan: LinkedIn   Flickr   Twitter   CD Baby


Tap into our network

We have an extensive network of partners available to support specific project requirements.

We work with specialists in qualitative research, interaction design, industrial design, and others as well as teams around the world (including India, China, Latin America, Russia, and Europe) as part of REACH: The Global Design Research Network.



Past Speaking Engagements
  • About, With, and For at the Institute of Design (2002 - 2005; 2004 slides here)
  • Adobe Systems (2005) - the challenges of being a creative inside a corporate environment
  • 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
  • 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
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