In winter quarter, the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering hosts a 10-week seminar series on User Experience (UX), where we welcome industry experts to speak about current issues and research in the field. Talks are open to members of the UW community to attend. Find the full schedule online at www.hcde.uw.edu….

Working Backwards to Design for the Future

How do you design for a future that is quickly growing all around you? In a world powered by emerging technologies like connected devices, machine learning, and natural language processing, we need to design customer experiences with little or no precedent. Having a hand in this innovation, Amazon has a mission to focus on its customers and create product experiences that are truly useful and delightful in this new world. But how do we invent for a future that doesn’t exist yet? How do we make sure we’re on the right track? In this talk, Janet Galore will share how Amazon sets a vision for the future, and how it builds a path to get us there.

Janet Galore directs Amazon’s Concept Lab in the Retail Experience Design group at Amazon and has with the company for just over five years. In her previous ten years at Microsoft, she directed and prototyped future customer experiences for Microsoft Research. Her earlier career was spent designing, directing, and animating at a variety of entertainment startups, after doing graduate studies in pure mathematics. Outside of work, Janet is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker, and is on the 4Culture Public Art Advisory Committee, as well as the Board of Directors at Arts Corps.