Jon Kolko is the founder and director of Austin Center for Design, a progressive educational institution teaching interaction design and social entrepreneurship. His work focuses on bringing the power of design to social enterprises, with an emphasis on entrepreneurship and large-scale industry disruption. He has worked extensively with both startups and Fortune 500 clients, and he has a breadth of experience in consumer electronics, mobility, web services, supply chain management, demand planning, and customer-relationship management. He has worked with big-brand clients such as AT&T, HP, Nielsen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Ford, IBM, Palm and other leaders of the Global 2000, as well as with startups like Socialware, Spredfast, Vast, Attivio, and more.
Jon has held positions of executive director of design strategy at Thinktiv, a venture accelerator in Austin, Texas, and both principal designer and associate creative director roles at frog design, a global innovation firm. He was also a professor of interaction and industrial design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he was instrumental in building both the Interaction and Industrial Design undergraduate and graduate programs. Jon has also held the role of director for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), and editor-in-chief of interactions magazine, published by the ACM.
Jon is the author of the book Thoughts on Interaction Design, published by Morgan Kaufmann, Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis, published by Oxford University Press, and the forthcoming text Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, published by Austin Center for Design.
Jon Kolko is the founder and director of Austin Center for Design, a progressive educational institution teaching interaction design and social entrepreneurship. His work focuses on bringing the power of design to social enterprises, with an emphasis on entrepreneurship and large-scale industry disruption. He has worked extensively with both startups and Fortune 500 clients, and he has a breadth of experience in consumer electronics, mobility, web services, supply chain management, demand planning, and customer-relationship management. He has worked with big-brand clients such as AT&T, HP, Nielsen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Ford, IBM, Palm and other leaders of the Global 2000, as well as with startups like Socialware, Spredfast, Vast, Attivio, and more.
Jon has held positions of executive director of design strategy at Thinktiv, a venture accelerator in Austin, Texas, and both principal designer and associate creative director roles at frog design, a global innovation firm. He was also a professor of interaction and industrial design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he was instrumental in building both the Interaction and Industrial Design undergraduate and graduate programs. Jon has also held the role of director for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), and editor-in-chief of interactions magazine, published by the ACM.
Jon is the author of the book Thoughts on Interaction Design, published by Morgan Kaufmann, Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner's Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis, published by Oxford University Press, and the forthcoming text Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, published by Austin Center for Design.
