Artefact Welcomes Gabe Biller

by Kevin Wong, posted July 17th, 2008
categorized under artefact

The voyage continues as we evolve the research group within Artefact. Today we are happy to introduce our latest member, Gabriel Biller! As we pay homage to our research deities, let’s talk a bit about how Gabe found a place near and dear to our hearts.

Gabe  joins us from the Institute of Design as a recent Masters graduate in Design Planning. Prior to ID, Gabe graduated cum laude in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. Sounds fancy right? Well that’s only speaking to his academic history.

Looking further into his professional experience,  you can see his research muscles flexing across multiple areas including telecommunications, furniture, restaurant and educational domains. Across all these uniquely defined areas is a single thread that remained consistent: a passion for leading groups and organizations into better futures through design thinking and planning. Most recently, Gabe worked at Steelcase conducting internal research, which led to changes on how certain skills and activities may be supported, taught, and/or reinforced to help spur innovative thinking about current challenges and future opportunities.

We’re excited to have Gabe join us. A few of us already love him because he “let’s us win” at Halo! However, we’re sure he’ll get over being so modest soon enough. He’s also chalk full of great ideas and plans to grow out the business. Exemplary to his potential is a recently launched video, with fellow colleague Kristy Scovel, aimed to help young researchers learn a thing or two on ethnography and interviewing:

Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer from Gabe & Kristy on Vimeo.

“Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer,” which is a 33 minute film (counting credits) to help introduce newbies to some of the basics of ethnography and interviewing. We had a lot of fun making the movie, getting our classmates and faculty, as well as professionals and other outside people, to participate and help us with putting the movie together, and we feel like we found a good balance of levity, humor, and useful information. We’ve gotten good feedback from members of the design community and have even sparked off some old debate amongst the members of the Anthrodesign Yahoo! group.

Having studied Design Planning, we look forward to the insightful findings to come with future projects. Doing that includes:

• performing analysis of business, market and financial data identifying business opportunities
• working collaboratively with designers and the client to develop innovative ideas and solutions
• conducting competitive analysis (SWOT) and presenting insightful recommendations to business strategy and design
• learning about people’s aspirations, motivation, activities, habits and practices
• story boarding and interaction model development
• and many more…

Most importantly, he shares the same vision we do:

help stop the proliferation of stupid crap no one needs and instead, imagine, define and create a better future world.

A’men, Gabe. Welcome to Artefact!

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