2011 People

There are 3 essential groups who came together to save the world –

Designers.

There are two kinds of top designers who came together to work this magic: user experience designers and visual designers. See who was on board.

• For the uninitiated, user experience – or UX – designers are some interesting cats: half-engineer obsessed with how pieces fit together and half-artist squinting to see something that doesn’t exist yet. In the most forward-thinking organizations, they sit at the centers of digital and physical design – constructing experiences around user motivations and behaviors. This makes them systems thinkers, backing far enough away from problems to see the various causes, effects, levers and obstacles that others miss.

• The good news is that UX designers bring fresh perspectives and innovative approaches. The bad news is that much of what they produce is boxes and arrows, flow charts and schematics. We have enlisted talented visual designers to breathe life into the UX designs, so that the rest of us can understand and be inspired by what they produce.

Experts.

There are two kinds of experts who joined us to inspire and inform: highly-regarded authorities on the challenges before us and explosively imaginative thinkers in unrelated fields, who joined our designers to raise new questions, propose new answers and raise eyebrows. See who was on board.

Volunteers.

There are volunteers and there are volunteers. These were the latter – men and women who are deeply interested in helping develop new answers to important questions but who aren’t user experience or visual designers. These folks were not in steerage, but at the captain’s table. See who was on board.