You can reach me at valeriecasey [at] gmail.com
Official bio:
Valerie Casey is a globally recognized design leader and innovator. She was named a "Guru" of the year by Fortune magazine, and a "Master of Design" by Fast Company. Valerie is a leading thinker and practitioner in the areas of open innovation and design thinking.
Valerie is the founder and Executive Director of the Designers Accord, the global coalition of designers, corporate leaders, and educational institutions focused on creating positive impact. In 2007, Casey founded the non-profit and through her leadership, it has grown to be one of the most influential organizations in the design world. Fast Company writes that the Designers Accord is "on a path to change the culture of the creative community from bottom to top, and with it, the way everything is made, from toothbrushes to airplanes."
Valerie currently leads the digital experience practice at IDEO, where she specializes in helping organizations understand, shape, and ultimately capitalize on their internal and external networks to address cultural, economic, and environmental challenges with greater agility.
Prior to IDEO, Valerie was Executive Creative Director at frog design, where she led the design research and design strategy practices worldwide. Previously, Valerie was an Associate Partner at Pentagram Design, where she built the interaction design practice in San Francisco. She was also Associate Creative Director at vivid studios.
Valerie lectures on design throughout the international community, and is an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts. She holds a master's degree in cultural theory and design from Yale University and a BA from Swarthmore College.
Adopting the Designers Accord provides access to a global community of peers who share passion, ideas, and best practices around sustainable innovation. The premise is that our influence grows exponentially when we act together.
Since July 2007, over 150,000 members of the creative community, representing one hundred countries and each design discipline, have joined the Designers Accord. In addition to dozens of academic institutions and corporations, almost every major global design consultancy has adopted the five guidelines.
Read more about it on the Designers Accord website. You can follow the Designers Accord on Twitter too.
Featured Work / Opinions / Accolades
DMI, 09
Rotman, 09
Metropolitan Home: Design100, 09
AXIS magazine, 09
Sustainable Industries' First Ladies, 09
SHIFT, 09
Fortune: Gurus, 08
Fast Company: Master of Design, 08
Creativity, 08
GOOD magazine: Portraits, 08
PRINT, 08
AdAge, 08
ACM Interactions, 08
Dwell, 08
Core77, 08
Adweek, 08
Treehugger, 08
Unbeige, 08
Environmental Leader, 08
BusinessWeek, 07
form magazine, 07
Design Indaba magazine, 07
frog Design Mind, 07
Core77, 07
Strategic Management of Technological Innovation, 06
Forrester Research, 06, 05
MIT Journal of Performance Studies, 05
Gizmodo, 05
New York Times Magazine, 04
MIT Technology Review, 04
Yale University Enclave Symposium, 04
Retrospecta magazine, 03, 04
Axis magazine, 02
Effico magazine, 02
SHIFT, 02
Japan's Web Designing Magazine, 01
IDG's Web Design Studio Secrets, 00
Macworld magazine, 00
New Media Magazine, 00
C|NET, 00
Critique magazine, 00
Netscape, 99, 00
Adobe Web Gallery, 99, 00
Adweek, 99
Fast Company, 99
ZDTV, 99
Japan's MdN magazine, 99
SF International Multimedia Summit, 98
Adobe Web Page Design book, 97
Ventana Press Photoshop book, 96
San Francisco Art Institute, exhibit, 95, 96
Photographer's Forum magazine, 94
Head of Digital Experiences
IDEO
Provide strategic leadership for client relationships. Help companies and other organizations understand, shape, and ultimately capitalize on their internal and
external networks to address cultural, economic, and environmental challenges with greater agility.
Clients include: Samsung, AT&T, Microsoft, KODA, IDEO (07 - current)
Executive Creative Director
frog design
Led global user experience, design strategy, and design research. Directed multidisciplinary, cross-studio teams in developing the design vision
across product, digital, and brand platforms.
Clients included: Barnes & Noble, HP, Sprint, ESPN, TiVo, OpenTV, Cisco, MTV, Virgin Mobile, Samsung, ETS, Johnson & Johnson, Prudential, XM, Liberty Media, Kimberly-Clark, Intel (04 - 07)
(Graduate school from 02 - 04)
Associate Partner
Pentagram Design, San Francisco
Led the interaction design group, providing strategic definition and design for interactive projects; Developed strategic and creative programs to optimize user experience for products, environments (museum, office, retail), software, and websites.
Clients included: Vulcan/The Experience Music Project, Dell, Logitech, Nike, Evoke, Potlatch Paper (01 - 02)
Creative Director
frog design, Silicon Valley
Led the digital media team designing strategic, interactive, and visual solutions for online projects and products; Developed design methodologies and best practices; Provided project direction for the design and technology teams.
Clients included: SONICblue, Symantec, frogwerk, i2 (00 - 01)
Associate Creative Director
vivid studios, San Francisco
Developed the creative vision for online ventures and ecommerce websites in the areas of brand and business strategy, information architecture, user experience, and technology.
Clients included: More.com, Coca-Cola, FinAid, Edgewood Creek, OpenAuto, HealthAxis (97 - 00)
Designer
Freelance in San Francisco
Designed information architecture and graphics for rich-media, editorial websites, film.
Clients included: Microsoft, National Geographic, Miller Freeman, Torani Syrups, Electravision, Dancing Girl Productions (93 - 97)
Types of projects I work on
Social networks
Community development
Organization transformation
Mobile phone design
Educational product concepts
Children's safety product concepts
Product accessory strategies
Future-of-retail concepts
Mobile phone feature strategies
Global retail ad campaigns
Health and beauty products
Infant products
SMB web business
Consumer out-of-box experience
Food platform development
Financial services websites
Organizational behavior modeling
Satellite radio
Food distribution web platform
Auto purchasing website
Heads-up display concepts
Mobile museum guides
Kid's rich-media websites
IT management products
Companion website for tv programming
E-commerce websites
Museum wayfinding
Mobile sports products
Marcom websites
Web community forums
Consumer web-based software
Business web-based software
Airport terminal design concepts
Consumer webpads / tablets
In-store kiosks
Corporate intranets
Retail interactive video concepts
Mobile photography strategies
Lifestyle product concepts
Swarthmore College
BA English Literature, additional focus Psychology, minor Women's Studies, 94
Graduate thesis work / Cultural theory
The essays in this collection were written and published as part of my graduate studies, and explore how cultural knowledge is shaped through representation and display. This discourse remains central to
my perspective on design thinking and design practice.
I selected the museum as my object of investigation because it illuminates so well the political, performative, and individual aspects of culture effect. Each of these three text argues that the museum acquires social authority by controlling ways of seeing. The first paper offers an historical investigation of the evolution of modern museum practice by theorizing three primary typologies of display: legislative, interpretive, and performative. The second paper builds on the framework of the first, and further develops the notion that the museum is a space of social performance, and always has been. The third essay examines the conditioning of object value in the museum, and proposes a new interactive paradigm for the museum experience.
This work is situated in the ongoing museological debate that claims the contemporary museum is in crisis. I contend that the traditional - and dismissive - critical views of contemporary museums neglect to discern how complex and non-traditional museum experience has already become. Further, the contemporary museum is at a tipping point where museum visitors' reception of new techniques of display can actually open up museal experience, rather than simply disrupt the closed contemplative circuit and so diminish viewer relations with objects.
Each essay in this collection varies slightly in tone based on its target audience. As such, the collection as a whole enacts the performance of research and writing.
The Museum Effect
Gazing from Object to Performance
in the Contemporary Cultural-History Museum
Staging Meaning
Performance in the Modern Museum
The Technocratic Museum
Art in the Age of Networked Communication