Kristian Simsarian ❤️ Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Berkeley, California, Us

Teaching graduate thesis (MDes) at UC Berkeley’s Jacobs Center for Innovation.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

I’ve retired from the programs I founded at CCA and have been nominated to Professor Emeritus (to be confirmed spring 2025)

San Francisco, Ca, Us

I research and teach compassionate activism and social innovation through technology design. We strive to remain grounded in right action toward all living things. I have the privilege to teach in the graduate design program I founded in 2015.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

One of my missions is to meet the challenges of the 21st century by increasing the capacity to create a more humane world with technology and design. A key part of this is to close the gap between technological progress and societal need through teaching and practicing inclusive and systemic innovation while simultaneously improving the graduate learning experience.At CCA I have met this mission by leading several capacity building efforts by founding two new STEM programs for the college, a BFA and an MDES in Interaction Design while building up a committed new faculty for each. In 2015 I put CCA at the center of the Interaction Design world by being the educational host for the annual conference IxD 2015. Together with CCA's Center for art and public life, we founded the IxD Social Lab committed to students learning by doing, by working shoulder-shoulder with community partners collaboratively, inclusively, systemically, experientially and experimentally to address complex social challenges in San Francisco. Increasingly the students emerging from these programs are next-generation design leaders in the Silicon Valley, and beyond, landing senior positions at Google, Facebook, IDEO, Apple, Amazon along with the emerging purpose-driven startups that will impact our lives.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

In late 2010 I was asked by CCA Provost to define a new discipline and create a new BFA major of Interaction Design at CCA. Over the six years, I established the world’s first four-year undergrad interaction design curriculum, hired sixty committed faculty, received STEM status.With the Humanities and Sciences chair, we hired a creative coding faculty to provide a foundation for STE(A)M education at CCA. This effort ultimately became a new minorTogether with forward-thinking faculty from all divisions, I led the creation of a physical STEM space for students with amazing colleagues from all college divisions to create the Hybrid Lab in San Francisco. The Hybrid Lab is now a thriving college-wide space for making with technology. Provost Melanie Corn wrote of these efforts:“Let me commend you for the fantastic work you have done in developing a new program from the ground up, including the provision of outstanding vision and leadership, excellence in faculty hiring and support, and superb administrative acumen and collaboration with admissions, communications, and advancement.”

Portland, Oo

Portland, Oo

I am joining the Zebras Unite network to help establish and grow a new inclusive entrepreneurial model.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Collective Creativity helps purpose-driven leaders build innovative organizations by focusing on co-creating critical innovation infrastructure and culture: people, places, processes, products, and pipelines. Whether digital transformation effort or the forefront to humanize and innovate disruptive technologies such as AI and blockchain, we work with all organizations, meeting leaders, and founders where they are to steward change. In these divided times with increased climate instability, globalization, disruptive technologies, and the collapse of central government, I see a need for more creativity and less fight, flight or freeze. I formed Collective Creativity with a sincere belief that working together toward loving technological innovation is key to creating a better world.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Denizen is a community that recognizes the need to redesign the incentives and social contract underpinning modern society. In both our professional and personal capacities, we are committed to addressing the fundamental challenges facing humanity today.Denizen builds collective wisdom via shared learning. Through thoughtful civic discourse, we make sense of the current times and develop a shared vision for a more equitable, caring, regenerative future. Opportunities for collective action naturally arise, spurring action. Together, we empower each other to be the change we wish to see in the world.

San Rafael, California, Us

A Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment draws on modern science and psychology to bring the ancient inner psychological science of Buddhist meditation to twenty-first century people hungry for happy, meaningful lives.

New York, Ny, Us

The Long Term Stock Exchange aims to promote a healthier economy by enabling 21c company builders to create long-term resilient and innovative organizations. I am excited to join the Long-Term Stock Exchange as an advisor. My goal is to replace outdated notions of short-term competitive advantage (e.g., Porter) with more contemporary views of aligned capitalism and continual innovation. Watch this space.

Sunol, California, Us

Our mission, at Humans For AI, is to achieve gender parity by increasing the number of women working in all domains of applied Artificial Intelligence (currently 22%).We recognize the emerging importance of AI for business and society and the clear lack of women in the field. We believe the next wave of growth and value will be driven by Domain Experts in the field of AI. Domain experts (e.g., professionals in healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and law) are problem finders. They know the crucial problems, domain-specific opportunities, constraints, and critical success criteria that will make a difference.We believe that gender parity and higher diversity in AI domain experts will lead to increased social alignment, humanization and broadening of the field of AI.We are looking for catalytic funding to help take this mission forward.

New York, Ny, Us

A crack team of security and privacy experts founded Wickr in California to bring top-secret spy tools to the mainstream with a mission of defending the basic human right of private communication. I began working with Wickr in 2015 to help them scale and re-brand from a rogue branded app startup to a trustable enterprise offering that begins to put great design on par with great engineering. Along with the brand, we are continually working to create a world-class UX offering. For the brand work, I helped Wickr bring in the amazing folks at Daylight Design. See old brand here: https://goo.gl/9EhzDt and new brand here: https://goo.gl/A46kB9

San Francisco, California, Us

IDEO is an amazing organization that I feel privileged to be associated with since 2000. Being at the nexus of an impactful design network in San Francisco, I help increase design capacity, highlight design opportunities of emerging technologies such as AI, and blockchain. I help to bridge our international design communities and further opportunities to help design grow and increase positive social impact.One notable example came In 2016, when I hosted the IDEO Futures FinTech accelerator on blockchain technology at the California College of the Arts.

San Francisco, California, Us

I took on a more global role following the success of the SX business unit that I co-founded. As an associate partner I helped lead the effort to scale digital competency firm-wide; ranging from pixels to people to processes and exploring how systems design would enable design thinking to have more impact. During this period I helped navigate the integration of digital practices into everything IDEO does which helped fuel the growth of IDEO into the largest design-led innovation consultancy in the world. I also worked to exhibit and scale best practices for long-term client relationship and organizational transformation.Along the way, I led a small effort to develop IDEO's tagline "impact by design.” I like how powerful three words can be, and I am proud of that.

San Francisco, California, Us

In 2004 I co-founded and co-led the Software Experiences (SX) business practice with Duane Bray. From 2004-2008, I served as director, leading operations and co-leading client strategy we grew the IDEO digital business from niche to mainstream, from $2M-$20M/year. SX focused on helping organizations innovate multi-touchpoint strategies and helping clients, build human-centered agile design processes, and grow their own UX quality processes. We ultimately transformed this vertical business unit into a more impactful core horizontal function of IDEO that fueled the next wave of growth of this Innovation powerhouse.

San Francisco, California, Us

IDEO felt like a natural fit for me in 2000. I was sitting on the cutting edge and inventing the future of technology, ethnography, and robotics. I was looking for a way to bring this more into day-day business practice to influence large organizations. IDEO was a great platform to bring this perspective forward. At the time, academic funding for robotics in the US was mostly for military applications. I was keen to join IDEO in no small part because of their anti-military human-centered approach.My work received several patents and appeared on the covers of magazines like Business Week and Metropolis and in newspapers like the NYT. It was an incredible 18 years.

New York, New York, Us

Rosenfeld Media is the premier publisher of UX books and increasingly conferences. As an editorial board member, I help guide decisions around what should get published, which authors get support, and what topics are relevant and germaine to UX practitioners. As strategic board member, I help broker valuable connections to Rosenfeld Media with other industry executives and consultants, and advise on future direction and opportunities.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Educating and enabling next generation human-centered design leaders to scale design thinking for social impact in the world.

Göteborg, Se

Robotics, AI, VR, AR, Mixed Realities, Smart Objects, working with K-4 children, oh my.Inventing the keyboard-less, screen-less future through augmented, virtual and tangible technology tools to enhance collaborative work, play, and education. My PhD work pioneered the building and study of collaborative supervisory multi-modal interfaces for semi-autonomous robots. This involved speech and gesture control and a mixture of virtual and augmented realities. I built robot localization systems and a computer vision calibration systems that helped register remote robot images in a VR partial model. This work laid groundwork for much of the AI+Human work that followed.

Chicago, Il, Us

Teaching subjects ranging from artificial intelligence to introduction to computer programming.

The NATO-sponsored Advanced Study Institute 'The Biology and Tech­nology of Intelligent Autonomous Agents' was an extraordinary event. For two weeks it brought together the leading proponents of the new behavior­ oriented approach to Artificial Intelligence in Castel Ivano near Trento. The goal of the meeting was to establish a solid scientific and technological foun­dation for the field of intelligent autonomous agents with a bias towards the new methodologies and techniques that have recently been developed in Ar­tificial Intelligence under the strong influence of biology. Major themes of the conference were: bottom-up AI research, artificial life, neural networks and techniques of emergent functionality. The meeting was such an extraordinary event because it not only featured very high-quality lectures on autonomous agents and the various fields feeding it, but also robot laboratories which were set up by the MIT AI laboratory (with a lab led by Rodney Brooks) and the VUB AI laboratory (with labs led by Tim Smithers and Luc Steels). This way the researchers and fellows could also gain practical experience and discuss in concreto what the difficulties and achievements were of different approaches. This meeting is organized by Rolf Pfeifer (University of Zurich).

Edinburgh, Gb

Exploring mobile robot self-localization and also conveyor belt pose identification for factory assembly environments using LIDAR (laser range-finder) imagery.

Charlottesville, Va, Us

Working on computational geometry and algorithms for mobile robot navigation and self-localization within built environments. This work culminated in Master thesis and resulted in several peer reviewer published works and conference presentations including an IEEE Robotics journal article.

Exploring tertiary and homologous structures in proteins, algorithms for gene matching in massive databases, and tech support in a lab focused on the underlying mechanisms for viral diseases such as HIV.

Bs, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science And Studio Architecture

Doctor Of Philosophy - Phd, Human-Robot Collaboration, Virtual And Augmented Reality

Graduate Research And Study, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computer Science

Master Science W/ Honors, Robot Perception, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science

Hs

Leadership

Vipassana Meditation

Improvisation