CEO, Adaptive Path

Brandon’s passion for understanding the needs of customers has taken him everywhere from homes of cancer patients to the tunnels beneath Disney World. He believes experience design is a differentiator for business strategy.

His insight with customers—plus a solid grounding in business analysis and a mastery of design methods—allows Brandon to help organizations define and design more meaningful experiences for their customers.

Brandon has over a decade of experience developing new products, services and user experiences for the web, desktop and devices. He’s keynoted, presented and conducted workshops at such conferences at Business to Buttons, IA Summit, Designertopia, UX Week and UIE Web App Summit.

Brandon is a past editor for the Institute of Design’s Perspectives on Design and Strategy, allowing him to pick-the-brains of leaders in the fields of innovation, design and strategy.

He also has a love of Excel that is unnatural for a designer.

Brandon co-authored Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World and was named one of Business Week’s “Twenty-One People Who Will Change Business”.

Design Director, Adaptive Path

Chris’s journeyman path has helped shape his belief that finding the right mix of communication design enables people to have compelling and useful experiences with the products and services around them.

Before joining Adaptive Path, Chris was Senior User Experience Architect at user experience consultancy Macquarium, helping improve the online product experience for clients such as Lowes.com and InterContinental Hotels Group. Prior to that, Chris was Lead User Experience Designer for a start-up in video syndication defining the user experience for all their consumer facing products. He was also formerly Senior Information Architect at CNN.com and has previously worked for or with companies such as Corbis, Microsoft, Nokia, General Motors and AT&T Wireless. He has also spent time with a number of start-up ventures, spanning information architecture, interaction design and visual and communication design.

Chris holds an MFA in design from the Savannah College of Art & Design, has taught design at NYU’s school for continuing education and is currently an adjunct professor at Austin Community College, teaching interface design. He has a passion for designing typefaces and gives presentations on type design to graduate level design students.

Chris is also a magnet for stray dogs.

Design Director, Adaptive Path

Over the last 10 years Henning has worked with a diverse group of organizations to develop multi-channel strategies and solutions for communications, services, and products for the web and beyond.

His focus is on the confluence of business strategy, user research, and product/service development. He also specializes in international and cross-cultural work, having led Adaptive Path’s business in Europe from 2009 to 2012. Over the past five years he has worked with clients like Ameriprise, Ashoka’s Changemakers, ASICS, CGI, Deutsche Bank, Hallmark, ING, Intuit, Leapfrog, NXP, Rovi, Vanguard Financial, Vodafone Group and Yell.

Henning holds a MDes from the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology and a B.A. in International Relations from Tufts University. He speaks German fluently and is slowly working on his Mandarin to impress his in-laws.

Design Director, Adaptive Path

At Adaptive Path Jamin leads project teams and helps define the creative practice. His work includes designing solutions in healthcare, education, finance, media, commerce, and social interaction for an array of clients, from large international organizations to startups.

Previously, he was a senior designer at Nokia, a master of design student at Carnegie Mellon University, a web consulting business owner, an editor, and a journalist. He also fried burgers at McDonald’s, sold cigarettes at 7-11, and tidied up the giftware section at Marshalls.

Jamin is a member of the Service Design Network Advisory Board. He contributed to the book, This Is Service Design Thinking, and frequently speaks about service design and design practice at conferences and workshops. He also organizes Service Design Drinks in San Francisco.

More importantly, he plays soccer, writes poetry, draws, and makes beer.

 

Design Director, Adaptive Path

Jared firmly believes that design is a fundamental human instinct and that learning and practicing design gives you a glimpse into what makes us tick. He works closely with organizations to identify new strategic opportunities for product and service innovation, discovering new ways for design to deliver greater value to employees and customers.

Jared has had the good fortune of working with all kinds of companies, from small non-profit arts organizations to large multinational financial services, addressing everything from large strategic service and organizational design problems to detailed visual design. Some of his clients include Motorola, ASICS, BBVA, NXP, John Muir Health, Goldman Sachs, Boston Ballet, Hasbro and Harvard Business School.

Jared has a Masters of Design from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design, and a Bachelor of Design with an emphasis in visual communication, rhetoric and semiotics, from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design.

When he isn’t viewing reality through the lens of design, Jared enjoys losing time in used bookstores and developing his skills as an amateur musicologist. If things had turned out differently, he’d probably be a roadie for Slayer. Or a librarian.

 

Design Director, Adaptive Path

Maria is passionate about taking a broadly contextual systems approach to problem solving, using multidisciplinary design to produce the most enduring, resilient and enjoyable products and experiences possible.

Maria is happiest when she can find new insights, reveal hidden connections and bring clarity to complexity.

Maria’s background spans the disciplines of user experience strategy and design; content strategy; software and hardware design; and development, product management, technical communications and public relations.

Maria is active in the design community and is a member of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), the Information Architecture Institute (IAI) and the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of ACM SIGCHI (BayCHI). She founded and led IxDA Atlanta and is a Local Leader for IxDA San Francisco. At the IxDA’s Interaction 10 conference, she gave a talk titled, “Interaction Design for the 4th Dimension” in which she explored temporal considerations for design.

For fun, Maria is a competitive driver, an avid photographer and an interactive digital media artist. She’s especially interested in the intersection of computational physics and interactive art and its power to transform public spaces. Maria works with similarly-inspired artists, photographers and coders and has collaborated with members of Montreal’s Topological Media Lab on a variety of installations. She is also a licensed amateur radio operator with call sign W6IXD.

Though meticulous and exacting, Maria is generally easygoing and doesn’t take things too seriously, except when it comes to espresso and dominoes.

Design Director, Adaptive Path.

Patrick craves taking on the most complex design problems he can find regardless of the medium or context. He passionately advocates for elevating the humanity within institutions to ensure both business and community sustainability.

Patrick joined Adaptive Path after nearly a decade of service at Macquarium Intelligent Communications, where he built the firm’s user experience practice from the ground up. Patrick instilled in his organization a philosophy of blending a human-centered design methodology with a pragmatic consultative approach. In addition to managing the consulting practice, Patrick led initiatives primarily at Fortune 500 clients, including The Coca-Cola Company, Lowe’s, Estée Lauder, and UPS, and crafted strategies and concepts across numerous industries and genres. (Yes, he likes to keep busy).

Patrick received a MS in Information Design & Technology from the Georgia Institute of Technology, but he is thankful everyday for his humanities degree in English from the Honors College at the University of South Carolina. In fact, he urges leaders in business and technology to look to the humanities more for inspiration, innovation, and an invaluable counterweight to industrial-era management techniques. (Buy him some coffee, and he will talk your ears off about it).

When not scribbling design ideas on walls, Patrick can usually be found walking around a city in search of a great meal, viewing an engaging film, or losing himself in a good book. He also loves to travel and hopes you will invite him to speak, teach, or consult in your neck of the woods soon. (Especially if you are in Dublin. He loves that town).