October 18-19, 2002
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, U.S.A

Presenters' Biographies

Dawn Barrett has been Dean of the Architecture & Design Division of Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island since January 2001. From 1995 - 2000, Ms. Barrett was Head of the Department of Design, at the Jan van Eyck Akademie, a post-graduate werkplaats and research centre for Fine Art, Design and Theory in Maastricht, The Netherlands. Barrett's writing has been issued in a variety of publications, such as Parallax, Visible Language, and Zed as well as the anthology, Design beyond Design, edited by Jan van Toorn. Most recently, Barrett edited the English edition of Interface — an approach to design, authored by Gui Bonsiepe.

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Judy Brewer directs the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). She coordinates work on W3C technologies' support of accessibility for people with disabilities; accessibility guidelines for Web content and applications; tools for evaluation and repair of Web sites; education on Web accessibility solutions; and monitoring of research impacting the future accessibility of the Web. WAI's guidelines and educational resources — developed under W3C's consensus process with the participation of industry, people with disabilities, accessibility researchers, and government representatives — have been adopted by a number of governments and other organizations around the world. Prior to joining W3C, Ms. Brewer directed a project promoting access to assistive technology for people with disabilities. She worked on initiatives to increase access to mainstream technology for people with disabilities and improve dialog between industry and disability communities. Her background includes management, technical writing, education, applied linguistics, and disability advocacy.

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Michael Cooper, M.Ed. joined CAST in 1998, assuming primary responsibility for the educational design of technology-based learning environments, especially those delivered on the Internet. As project director for Bobby, CAST's award-winning Web page accessibility validation tool, Mr. Cooper leads ongoing innovation efforts, and has been instrumental in Bobby's development as an interactive evaluation and educational tool. He also leads collaborations with organizations in other countries to create foreign language versions of Bobby. Mr. Cooper's expertise with technical aspects of Universal Design for Learning is critical to his design work at CAST and he has spoken at numerous national and international conferences.

While at Harvard where he received his master's degree from the Graduate School of Education, he worked with the WGBH Teacher Center, providing support to teachers for pedagogical issues associated with integrating information technology into the curriculum. Before coming to the Boston area, Mr. Cooper served as a technology specialist in the disability services office at the University of Denver. At the University of Denver he researched technology as a barrier to and accommodation for individuals with disabilities, coordinated access and accommodations for students and employees with disabilities, and conducted awareness projects and educational in-services.

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Drempels Weg (translation: 'away with barriers') started in March 2001 to promote accessible websites for people with disabilities that will ultimately benefit all users. From its inception Drempels Weg understood the importance of actively involving state governments, business and other organizations by asking for their involvement and support.

In 2001 the State Secretary of the Ministry of Public Health, Wellbeing and Sports appointed 4 ambassadors, each representing a different disability. They are: people who are blind or have low vision, people with physical and cognitive disabilities, and people who are deaf or hard of hearing. The National Access Bureau oversees the work of the ambassadors.

A thematic approach was chosen for ambassadors to most effectively advocate for accessible websites and successfully target the various audiences and legislators. This approach made it easier to identify the different disabilities and how they effect the use of the internet by highlighting its opportunities and shortcomings. The ambassadors decided on a new theme for each month in the first year and researched and tested at least twenty websites related to the chosen subject. The research results were then offered to each of the twenty organizations to generate their support and have them sign a declaration of intent. One hundred twenty seven major organizations signed a declaration in the first year. Themes were varied, to mention a few: the world of finance, news and media, travel, employment and education, local and state government and politics.

After its first year Drempels Weg has now gone 'national'. New ambassadors are appointed in each region. They all work towards meeting the two goals of Drempels Weg: to promote the use of the internet to people with disabilities and to make all websites accessible.

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Kim Ducharme got her design training from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. She worked in environmental and exhibit design before turning her focus to interactive media. Before coming to Boston, she was part of the team that started up the hugely successful CitySearch.com.

Kim joined WGBH Interactive in 1997 as senior designer. Since then she has lead the design of a variety of award winning Web sites such as WGBH Online, and companion sites to PBS television series, including NOVA Online, Evolution and Commanding Heights. She also works with other interactive media, including interactive television, CD-ROM kiosks and, most recently, a fully accessible DVD for American Experience's "Chicago" mini-series premiering on PBS in January 2003.

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Shelley Evenson is seeSpace's co-founder and Chief Experience Strategist, where she focuses on understanding customer needs in depth and designing appropriate experience strategies. She is expert at tapping into the needs of constituents, defining the best opportunities to respond to those needs, quickly prototyping the response and iteratively reshaping it based on feedback.

Prior to seeSpace, Shelley was Chief Experience Strategist for Scient. Her client engagements have included Apple Computer, Bank of Montreal, Texas Instruments, Kodak, Williamsburg Institute, and Xerox. Shelley was 1997 Nierenberg Chair of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, and has an on-going teaching position at the Kellogg School of Management. She also currently serves on CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute Advisory Board

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Valerie Fletcher (Conference Co-Chair) is the Executive Director of Adaptive Environments in Boston, a non-profit founded in 1978 to address the design issues that confront adults and children with disabilities and older people. Adaptive Environments meets its mission through a wide variety of educational and consulting projects on the local, regional, national and international levels. It is the home of the federally funded New England ADA and Accessible Information Technology Center. Fletcher is the Principal Investigator. Adaptive Environments has been the lead sponsor of Designing the 21st Century, An International Conference on Universal Design and is planning the next event in Havana for January of 2004. Fletcher currently oversees projects ranging from universal design at the urban scale, to universal design in transportation, in affordable housing, offices, schools, cultural facilities, and in print and digital graphics. She has a masters in ethics and public policy from Harvard University.

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Kathy Gips is Director of Training at Adaptive Environments, Inc. a non-profit organization located in Boston dedicated to inclusion and integration of people with disabilities in their communities.

Through two of Adaptive Environments' major projects: the New England ADA & Accessible IT Center and the ADA National Access to Public Schools Project Ms. Gips provides trainings and technical assistance on the Americans with Disabilities Act and accessible IT (information technology) to state, county and municipal governments; businesses; non-profit organizations; public and private schools; people with disabilities, architects and advocates for people with disabilities.

Ms. Gips has over fifteen years experience in the disability field. Prior to working for Adaptive Environments, she was assistant director for community services at the Massachusetts Office on Disability.

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Larry Goldberg is Director of the Media Access Group at the WGBH Educational Foundation as well as Director of the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), a foundation which he founded in 1993. NCAM is a research and development facility dedicated to the issues of media technology for disabled people in their homes, schools, workplaces, and communities.

Mr. Goldberg has been extremely involved in the policy arena and was recently appointed to two FCC advisory bodies: the Technological Advisory Council and the Consumer/Disability Telecommunications Advisory Committee. His efforts have led to the passage of two FCC Reports and Orders for video description and digital television closed captioning. He is also a member of the advisory boards of Microsoft, America Online and numerous federally funded research and development projects.

In 1996, Mr. Goldberg was awarded WGBH's first for the invention of "Rear Window^TM" — a system for displaying hidden captions for deaf and hard-of-hearing people in movie theaters, amusement parks and other public attractions.

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Richard Grefé assumed the position of executive director of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), the largest and oldest membership organization of graphic designers, in the spring of 1995. During this period, AIGA has doubled in size, established a national design center on Fifth Avenue in New York, moved toward a more active role in advocacy and stimulating thinking about design, and centered itself on representing the process of designing, rather than designers. AIGA has become a vital center in emerging areas of design, including brand experience, experience design, interaction design and design for film and television.

Before joining AIGA, Ric was executive vice president of America's Public Television Stations, where he was responsible for public broadcasting's legislative strategy, strategic planning for local public television stations, and for coordinating public television's involvement in such local community projects as literacy, women's health and teenage drug awareness.

Ric spent nearly a decade leading a firm that dealt with public policy and economic issues; was a journalist at Time magazine and the Associated Press; and, for a brief period, was a printer's devil at the Stinehour Press.

He has always been interested in design, art and nonprofit institutions. He went to business school in order to develop his skills in dealing with public and social issues. The AIGA is the perfect joining of his interests and skills-at least from his perspective.

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Shawn Lawton Henry helps organizations develop and implement strategies to optimize design for usability and accessibility. For over a decade, she has worked with international standards bodies, research centers, government agencies, non-profit organizations, education providers, and Fortune 500 companies to advance user interface design. She has led user interface design efforts for software and web applications, and workshops on user interface and accessibility topics, including accessible design for Web interfaces, software, and consumer products. Shawn developed www.UIAccess.com to support her objective of bringing together the needs of individuals and the goals of organizations in the design of human-computer interfaces.

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Sarah Horton is a Web developer with Academic Computing at Dartmouth College, where she helps faculty incorporate technology into their teaching. In this position she develops instructional Web sites, provides faculty training, and establishes policies and resources to support Dartmouth's online curriculum. Upon realizing the imperative for accessible online course materials, she formed the Web Access Group (WAG), an ad hoc committee dedicated to promoting universal design for the Dartmouth Web. WAG is currently focused on providing guidelines for Web developers on campus, and on establishing a computing infrastructure that supports the development of accessible sites.

Together with Patrick Lynch she authored the best-selling Web Style Guide, recently released in its second edition. Her most recent book, Web Teaching Guide, was the 2000 winner of the American Association of Publishers Award for the Best Book in Computer Science. Both books are published by Yale University Press. Sarah regularly writes and speaks on the topic of accessible Web design. She is also a member of the Web Accessibility Initiative's Education and Outreach Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium.

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Jan Kubasiewicz is a Professor of Graphic Design and the Coordinator of Graduate Graphic Design Program at the Massachusetts College of Art and received his Masters in Fine Art from the State School of Art and Design in Lodz, Poland. He has lectured at several academic institutions, such as Osaka University of Arts, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Rhode Island School of Design, California Institute of Art, and the Art Center College of Design. His work has been featured in exhibitions at Skydoor Gallery, Aoyama, Tokyo; Bevier Gallery, Rochester Institute of Technology, New York; Philadelphia International Institute.Gallery; Artworks Gallery, Hartford, Connecticut; and Rhode Island's School of Design Graphic Center Gallery.

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Krzysztof Lenk studied graphic design and graduated with an MFA degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow (Poland). Before coming to the United States, he worked as a designer, art director and consultant for clients in Poland, France and Germany on a variety of publication design projects. He was an IBM fellow at the Aspen Conference in 1983. Lenk has also been professor of graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design, specializing in information design and typography since 1982.

Between 1990 and 2000, Krzysztof Lenk was Creative Director at Dynamic Diagrams, a consulting company specializing in information and interface design for both print and electronic media. They hold a long list of clients including Netscape, Harvard University, IBM, Microsoft, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, Merrill Lynch, Macmillan in London, McGraw-Hill, and the American Medical Association.

Projects from Dynamic Diagrams has been published by R.S.Wurman in Information Architects, Understanding USA, and in many other professional books and journals. Together with his partner, Paul Kahn, Lenk presents seminars and tutorials on visual aspects of information design for the computer environment at conferences and for corporate clients. In 2001 they published a book Mapping Web Sites, which has been printed in five different languages. Since 2000, he has been a creative advisor to Tellart, an animated and interactive design studio in Providence, RI.

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Roger Mandle was appointed Rhode Island School of Design's President in 1993. As an educator, art historian, and leader of major cultural institutions, he has been a nationally known figure in the field of education in the arts and humanities for the past twenty-five years. Prior to his appointment at RISD, he served as the Associate Director of the Minneapolis Museum of Art; Associate Director and then Director of the Toledo Museum of Art; and Deputy Director and chief curator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. A cum laude graduate of Williams College, Mr. Mandle holds a Masters of Arts degree from New York University and a Ph.D. in Art History from Case Western University. Mr. Mandle is also a published scholar and teacher on the subjects of aesthetics and Dutch art.

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Greg Pisocky is a Business Development Manager in Adobe Systems Government Group specializing in accessibility issues and assisting government agencies in the use of Adobe products to produce accessible content. Greg has been with Adobe Systems for over nine years and in the information technology industry for over 20 years. He is a graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.

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Bob Regan is the senior product manager for accessibility at Macromedia, where he works with designers, developers and engineers from around the world to communicate existing strategies for accessibility, as well as formulate new techniques to improve accessibility.

Bob holds a Masters degree in Education from Columbia University and is currently a doctoral student in Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation research focuses on accessibility policy implementation strategies. He has had a great deal of experience in the field of elementary and secondary education field, working six years as a teacher and technology leader in Chicago and New York City, as well as two years of teaching web design and accessibility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He has also participated in several speaking engagements, including the 2001 eGov Building Accessible Web Sites, the 2001 Ingraham Micro Interactive Accessibility Trends, the 2002 SXSW Accessibility: Can Stevie Wonder Read Your Website? He is also a frequent speaker at the Macromedia Accessibility Seminars.

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John Rheinfrank is an expert on business innovation, strategy development, and the use of ethnographic research methods to define latent/unarticulated need for new business processes, products and services. He is a cofounder of seeSpace, which collaborates with clients to develop insights about new business opportunities and turns them into actions that create immediate impacts and strategic business direction.

As a former senior strategist at the Doblin Group in Chicago, he directed programs that focused on decision strategy and on breakthrough product and service development. Prior to joining to Doblin Group, he was a Senior Vice-President at Fitch, an international design consulting firm, where he and Shelley Evenson founded Exploratory Design Laboratory (EDL), an interdisciplinary team conducting pioneering project-based design research. John's client engagements have included Xerox, Kodak, IBM, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, Sun Microsystems, 3M, Apple Computer, AT&T, Zurich Financial Services, Andersen Consulting and Ernst and Young. His work has been published in several books and journals of various fields, he is a trustee of the American Cybernetics Society, and is the founding editor of the software design journal interactions. His recent teachings include contributions to graduate seminars at Kellogg School of Management, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Illinois Institute of Technology.

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Bill Seaman, Professor. B.A., M.S., Ph.D. is the head of RISD's new graduate Department of Digital Media. Formerly with Centre for Advanced Inquiry in Interactive Arts (CaiiA), University of Wales, UK. Media Artist, Composer & Musician. Exhibitions: Guggenheim, New York; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Barbican Centre, London; Sprengle Museum, Germany; C3-Center for Culture and Communication, Hungary; The Daniel Langlois Foundation; NTT-ICC Tokyo. Awards: Prix Ars Electronica International Video Art Prize, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Bonn Videonale prize; First Prize, Berlin Film / Video Festival, for Multimedia and Visual Arts.

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Terry Swack is a 22-year veteran of the design profession as well as a leading digital strategist. Terry founded TSDesign as a graphic design firm in 1985, and redefined it as an Internet strategy and product design firm in 1995.

The development of the User Experience Audit in 1996, was the first offering of its kind and positioned TSDesign as an industry leader in design analysis and user experience management. Clients included both dot-coms and Fortune 1000 companies such as 3M, Dell, Compaq, BankBoston, WebCriteria, Tripod and Cendant Mortgage. In December, 1999, TSDesign was acquired by Razorfish, a global digital services provider. As VP/Experience Design, Terry was a principal strategist in the redesign of the service delivery organization and practices, worldwide, to create a holistic approach to designing effective solutions for clients and their customers. In 1998 Terry and Clement Mok organized the Advance for Design Forum, an initiative of the AIGA. In 2000 it formally became the AIGA Experience Design community of interest and has a national membership with groups established in major US cities and London. Terry is the AIGA Experience Design national chair and serves on the AIGA board of directors. Terry is now an experience design strategist and consults independently on experience auditing, brand experience and digital product strategy, organizational planning for digital service delivery and client advocacy. She is a contributing reviewer to Internetworld's Deconstructing column and writing a book on the impact of experience strategy on business.

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Rachel Tanenhaus is an Information Specialist at the New England ADA & Accessible IT Center, with a particular interest in accessible electronic and information technology. She has Bachelors degrees in Journalism and Women's Studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a Masters in Public Health from the Boston University School of Public Health. As a member of the disability community in both her personal and professional lives, she has been advocating for informational access since graduate school. She has been an Internet user since she was 17, and has moderated a number of online communities centering around disability issues. Prior to her work with the Center, she worked as a research assistant and NIDRR Scholar on a study of the effects of Internet use on people with spinal cord injuries. She has presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Disability Studies, and has been published in the American Journal of Public Health. Recently, she became a member of the Somerville Commission for People with Disabilities.

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Hans van Dijk (Conference Co-Chair). Professor Hans van Dijk, a native of The Netherlands, came to the USA in 1969 to further his studies in design. He did post-graduate work at Carnegie-Mellon University and received his Master of Art degree in Visual Communication Design from the Ohio State University. From 1973 until 1978 and again from 1991 until today Professor Van Dijk has been a full-time faculty member in Graphic Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. In the interim period, from 1978 through 1990 he was a partner in the New York City design group Works. From 1993 until 2000 Van Dijk was Department Head of Graphic Design. He played a critical role in the establishment of the RISD Research Foundation of which he is a board member. Recently, he chaired the faculty committee creating the new Graduate Department in Digital Media. Professor van Dijk's expertise is in design methodology and strategy, design theory (semiotics), and typography. Currently he is actively involved in Universal Web Design to improve access for people with visual and cognitive disabilities. This research is supported by a grant from the Markle Foundation.

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Eric Velleman is director and specialized ICT accessibility researcher and trainer of the Accessibility Foundation in the Netherlands. He has worked with ICT and visually impaired students for 14 years trying to find solutions to any barriers that they may experience. Together with the University of Utrecht, he developed a series of tests for the visually disabled to automatically generate a user profile for the user settings of a digital atlas. Currently, his foundation is advising over 75 of the largest Dutch companies on accessibility of internet and internet-based multimedia. Eric is also the author of Site Seeing, the first book about making websites accessible.

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