In 2023, it is 20 years since Bruce ‘Tog’ Tognazzi wrote his call to arms that became the spark to organize IxDA. We don’t often tell our origin story from the point of view of the women who stepped up to be part of that founding group.
Moderated by Erin Malone, hear their stories and insights about IxDA’s roots, and the paths they’ve traveled since then.
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Erin Malone
Principal, Experience Matters Design and Chair, California College of the Arts IxD Program
Erin is principal at Experience Matters Design, a UX consulting firm specializing in designing systems, complex internal tools, and social interfaces, as well as providing research and creating products that matter to under-serviced populations. She consults with the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society working on projects to explain, reveal, mitigate, and prevent online hate in online social and game platforms. Erin chairs the Interaction Design program at California College of the Arts and teaches a variety of Interaction courses including IXD History and many of the introductory foundational classes.
Erin is the co-author, of the book Designing Social Interfaces 2nd and 1st editions, published by O’Reilly Media.
Lisa deBettencourt
Founder and Principal
Lisa is a product strategy and design leader. She works with organizations in healthcare and life sciences to discover, develop, and operationalize innovative ways to improve the patient and clinical experience amidst increasing regulatory demands, consumer expectations, and technological complexity.
After more than two decades of creating award-winning products and commercial successes for businesses within and beyond healthcare, Lisa founded Forge Harmonic, LLC, a customer insights and strategy firm that’s on a mission to humanize the digital transformation in healthcare by shaping breakthrough solutions that put people at the center. Previously, she was VP of Design at Confer Health, a health tech startup building at-home clinical diagnostics and, prior to that, she was Head of Product Design at Imprivata, a leading healthcare IT security company.
She co-authored the book Designing for Emerging Technologies: UX for Genomics, Robotics, and the Internet of Things and is an adjunct professor in the Digital Media Master’s Degree Program at Northeastern University. She holds an MS degree in Human Factors in Information Design from Bentley University and a BS degree from Rochester Institute of Technology.
Ana Domb
Ana Domb Krauskopf is an independent design researcher and strategist. She founded and directed the Interaction Design School at Veritas University in Costa Rica, the first IxD graduate program in Central America. She currently teaches at Lead University. Previously she was the Director of Brand Innovation at Almabrands in Chile. In the US, she worked at THE MEME, a design consultancy based out of Cambridge, MA.
She holds a Master’s degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, where she was part of the Convergence Culture Consortium under the direction of Henry Jenkins.
In past lives, she’s worked as a journalist, filmmaker, and music producer. She has consulted with Turner Broadcasting, Comcast, BAC-Credomatic, Mesoamérica, HIVOS, and UICN, amongst others.
Molly Wright Steenson
Molly Wright Steenson is a designer, author, professor, and leader. At Carnegie Mellon University, where she has been on faculty since 2015, she is the Vice Provost for Faculty and the K&L Gates Associate Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies, and Associate Professor in the School of Design. With IxDA, she was the co-chair of the Interaction Awards from 2016–18.
Molly is the author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, 2017), which tells the radical history of AI’s impact on design and architecture, and Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press, 2019), co-edited with Laura Forlano & Mike Ananny. Her essay “A Series of Tubes” received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2021, and she is currently working on a performance lecture about pneumatic tubes with musician Jesse Chandler, who records under the name Pneumatic Tubes.
Her academic career began 20 years ago as a professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy. Prior to Carnegie Mellon, she was an assistant professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2013–15. Molly holds a PhD in Architecture from Princeton University and a Master’s in Environmental Design from the Yale School of Architecture.
A web pioneer since 1994, she’s worked at groundbreaking design studios, consultancies, and Fortune 500 companies, and co-created Maxi, a pop culture feminist webzine from 1997–99.
