Trying to be a Good Ancestor – Alan Cooper and Renato Verdugo – Sept 4

Alan and Renato will be conducting a co-discussion/presentation  and taking questions from the audience hot on the heels of their presentations at UX Australia in Melbourne.

Ancestry Thinking: Keeping Tech On Our Side

Register now on Eventbrite.

University of Sydney LogoIn association with the University of Sydney Architecture, Design, and Planning campus.

About the Participants

Alan Cooper

bald man smiling at the camera, wearing a blue shirt with a window and cityscape behind him

Alan Cooper wants to be a good ancestor. That is why he is the co-creator of the “Ancestry Thinking Lab.” It’s an organization dedicated to finding and teaching practical methods for assuring that technology products behave in an ethical manner. This is just his latest effort in a long career as an inventor and  thought leader in the world of software.

In 2017, Alan and his wife, Sue, sold Cooper, the company they had founded 25 years earlier. It was the very first interaction design consulting firm. Early on he established the basic design methods that are used across the industry today and helped to popularize the notion that digital technology shouldn’t terrorize its human users. In particular, his invention, design personas, is almost universally used in the field. He shared his tools, knowledge, and experience in two best-selling books, still in print and widely referenced. The company’s new owners are a European design firm, Designit, owned by Wipro, a tech company based in Bangalore, India.

In 1988 Alan invented a dynamically extensible visual programming tool and sold it to Bill Gates, who released it to the world as Visual Basic, arguably the most successful programming language ever. This is how Alan earned the sobriquet, “The Father of Visual Basic.” He started his first software company in 1976 and produced what has been called “The first serious business software for microcomputers.”

In 2017, Alan was named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, California. In 1998 he was named a Visionary by the Silicon Valley Forum, and in 1995 Bill Gates named him the first Windows Pioneer.

In 2011, Cooper left Silicon Valley to live on a 50-acre former dairy farm in the rolling hills north of San Francisco where he continues to advocate for more humane technology.

Twitter: @mralancooper and on Medium

WWW: ancestrythinking.commonkeyranch.com

Renato Verdugo

Young man with short dark hair and a small beard, smiling

Renato is an interdisciplinary UX researcher, with a background in both Computer Science, and Aesthetics & Art Theory. He currently works at YouTube in New York City.