Jan-Christoph Zoels is Experientia’s founding partner in charge of user experience design. Originally from Germany, he lived for many years in the USA, where he taught at RISD, and was director of information architecture at Sapient and a senior designer at Sony. He was a co-founder and senior associate professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, where he ran the business innovation workshops called Applied Dreams.
In his work Jan-Christoph focuses specifically on people’s experience of mobile services and applications to support sustainable lifestyles. He advocates a strategic integration of user experience modeling, design, prototyping and iterative testing to improve the desirability of products, environments and services.
In his consulting activities he specializes on experience prototyping, foresight scenarios, design and service concepts. Clients include Alcatel Lucent, Condé Nast, CVS Pharmacy, Fidelity International, Kodak, Max Mara, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, SITRA, Swisscom, Toncelli, Tre Spade and Vodafone.
In 2009 a multi-disciplinary team of engineers (Arup, UK), architects (Sauerbruch-Hutton, Germany) and Experientia won the international Low2No architecture competition for Helsinki’s former docklands (www.low2no.org). The sustainable building block uses low carbon emission construction techniques, with completion in spring 2013. Experientia focuses on behavioural change initiatives, stakeholder engagement, participatory design processes and sustainable demand management solutions. Experientia won the National Award for Innovation in Service Design as well as the Holcim Award for Sustainable Construction for the Low2No work.
He has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Samsung’s Innovative Design Laboratory in Seoul, and Domus Academy, Milan.
During the last years, he was a keynote speaker at Banff’s New Media Institute, Bloomberg Media Futures in London, BMW's Marketing Innovation Lab Forum in Munich, at Lift 07, MediaLab Prado in Madrid, at Mobile Nation: Creating Methodologies for Mobile Platforms conference in Toronto and at multiple conferences and design colleges. He holds four patents.
www.experientia.com
Please check out also our innovation and user experience blog: Putting People First
