Gary Swift Email & Phone Number

Design consulting services including: Systems Design, Strategic Design, Software Design and Engineering (whole systems, user experience and user interface design, policies, procedures and processes), Internet/Intranet/Web design, Industrial and Product Design, Information and Graphic Design, Environmental Design.* For details about my services, see the Design MatriX website at: http://www.designmatrix.com* For a portfolio slide show of some of my work, see:http://www.designmatrix.com/portfolios* For some testimonials and my résumé in HTML, Word or PDF format, seehttp://www.designmatrix.com/portfolios/testimonials.htmlJoint projects with other design companies and consultants are welcome. When required, other associates are available to fill out a team.

Greater Los Angeles Area

Developed software tools for the Plango mobile language learning app, an iOS (iPhone, iPad) product of The Plan9 Group. These tools included processing and conversion among PDF, PostScript, ASCII, XML, graphical (PNG, etc.), and sound file (MP3, etc.) formats, synchronizing the display of text and speech, and automating the production of content. Technologies included various PDF tools, GhostScript, ImageMagick, Sound eXchange (SoX), and Perl. Used Xcode to manage and build product archives. Implemented iOS 7 changes with Interface Builder and Objective C code. Also developed the product's web site, plangoplango.com.

Part of the team aquired by SunSoft to port the Solaris operating system to Intel (x86) platforms, I was responsible for systems integration, source code configuration management, release engineering, engineering policies and practices, and software tools.* Led a team to develop Common Source Code policies and procedures for merging the Solaris source code for Intel (x86) and SPARC architectures. This enabled the Solaris/x86 developers to synchonize it with Solaris on SPARC machines.* Developed strategy and tactics to ship Solaris/x86 release 2.1 on the schedule for release 2.0, and to skip releases 2.2 and 2.3 so that Solaris 2.4 on x86 and SPARC were released together.* Co-managed Systems Integration and Release Engineering for Solaris/x86.* Served on various business, program and software engineering teams for Solaris 2.1 and 2.4.* Participated in Sun's Software Development Architecture Team for the Software Development Framework (engineering standards and procedures).

Interactive Systems was the first company to sell and support the UNIX operating system. In addition to our own UNIX OS products, we ported UNIX to many other architectures for other companies. It was acquired by Kodak about 1987, who sold the Product Division to SunSoft (software division of Sun Microsystems) in late 1990.Here I led projects in UNIX operating system and application development, documentation, systems integration, quality assurance, release engineering and customer support. This included: managing the company's first Systems Integration Team, developing software tools and the first test suites (which led to establishing a QA department), promoting engineering standards, policies and procedures, and serving as Kodak's Quality Leadership Process (TQM, etc.) coordinator for Interactive's Product Division.

As systems designer for the Marketing Research Dept., I designed methods, data bases and software for market research. This included statistical regression analysis of historical data, Delphi studies and trend analysis for market forecasting, and decision trees and production rules (modeled after the RAND Corporations's RITA artificial intelligence agent) for marketing strategies.

"The SET", as it was called, could best be described as a Design Think Tank. Our major project was to design an environmental education system for the Office of Environmental Education, US Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), including computer assisted components for environmental modeling, simulation and forecasting, networking and teleconferencing, and problem solving. We also designed design a participatory planning and governance system for Southwest Community College in Los Angeles, including operations and governance manuals and methods for developing and funding new types of educational programs.

As an instructor in the School of Design, Cal Arts, I taught courses related to analyzing and solving complex design problems in a systems context. These courses included Design Theory, Design Methodology, Bionics, Pattern Language, Futures Forecasting, General System Theory and a project-oriented Systems Design Studio. These courses were cross-disciplinary, attended by students in industrial design, graphic design, environmental design and architectural design. The Design Theory class even attracted students from the Schools of Art, Music and Dance.

Mfa, School Of Design (Systems, Product, Graphic, Envionmental And Architectural Design)

Activities and Societies: Student representative in the School of Design Governance Committee. Participated in various curriculum.

Bfa, Industrial Design (Major); Graphic Design (Minor)