Today is Dan Soltzberg’s first day here and (at my request) he wrote a little reflective piece about his day, and his background.
Welcome, Dan!
So far, in all the ways I usually measure my days, this has been a great one. I’m at my new desk at Portigal Consulting eating my first lunch (a tasty roast beef sandwich from a little café down the street), Steve and I are preparing for a trip next week which will be our first time in the field together, and there are two Beagles and a Golden Retriever lounging around the office. (The dogs are wonderfully insightful when it comes to developing business strategies.) I’ve just joined Portigal Consulting as a Design Researcher, which is the perfect cap on a year which has been one of those wonderful periods of convergence where everything I’ve done so far in my life adds up to create something new.
I’m refocusing my Masters program at SJSU on a hybrid of Industrial Design, Applied Anthropology and Human Factors, which is to say that what I’m really interested in is the intersection of creative problem-solving, collaborative processes, things, and human beings. Four-and-a-half years living and working in Japan, as well as living in California married to a Midwesterner after growing up in Boston, have taught me to respect how deep culture runs, and how important understanding context is if one wants to understand people’s behavior and desires. I’m really looking forward to working with our clients and helping to decipher and communicate these contexts and the design opportunities they illuminate.
Tags: beagle, dan soltzberg, employee, golden retriever, portigal consulting, staff, story, team, welcome
Dear Dan,
Comment by Xavier Cherrez 06.26.07 @ 6:40 amI’m looking forward to know more about your achievments. Here, in spain, what you are doing sounds fresh, promising.
good luck! Congratulations portigal.
xavier cherrez . Architect.
Welcome, Dan. Now I can steal good ideas not from Steven alone, but from you, too! I mean borrow. I try to give ideas back when I have any worth giving. I have got to figure out how to get tag clouds to happen on some blogs of ours. How does Steve stay so up on all this stuff?
Comment by Ken Erickson 07.08.07 @ 10:41 am