Mike Kuniavsky

Mike Kuniavsky is one of the founding partners of Adaptive Path. After three years of with Adaptive Path, Mike moved on to found ThingM and to follow other pursuits, including designing the experience of tangible technology. He is the author of "Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research" and "The Smart Furniture Manifesto," and has been developing commercial web sites since 1994.

Professional Background

In 2004, Mike wrote one of the first articulations of the application of ubiquitous computing concepts to everyday objects. He researched, wrote and edited "in.kitchen," the book that accompanied Whirlpool's kitchen of the future exhibit of the same name at the Milan Furniture Fair in 2006. He also founded the Wired Digital User Experience Lab for Wired Magazine's online division, where he also served as the interaction designer of the award-winning search engine, HotBot.

Mike has worked as a consultant and designer for companies such as PacBell, Crayola, National Public Radio, McGraw-Hill, Cypress Semiconductor, Whirlpool, Macromedia, Corel, Qualcomm, Yamaha. His writing and designs have appeared in a broad range of publications, most recently in MAKE magazine and the Wall Street Journal.

Mike researches, designs, and writes about people's experiences at the intersection of technology and everyday life. Companies and universities around the world use his 2003 book, "Observing the User Experience," to understand and teach techniques that bring the design of products closer to the people who use them. His next book, "Smart Things," expected in 2008 from Elsevier, will discuss user experience design for mobile devices and ubiquitous computing. He has also contributed to a number of other books, including the encyclopedic "HCI Handbook" (2007). He is a regular presenter at conferences focusing on the future of design and technology. In 2007 he delivered one of the keynote presentations at O'Reilly's 2007 Emerging Technology conference, was an invited speaker at Taste3, a premier food and wine conference and co-delivered a talk with David Rose, founder of Ambient Devices, at IDEA, the Information Architecture Institute's annual conference.