Jan-Christoph Zoels

Jan-Christoph Zoels is partner in charge of user experience at Experientia, an international experience design consultancy based in Turin, Italy, focused on helping companies evoke pleasurable experiences when people relate to their products and services - the pleasure of use, in short.

Until 2006 he was a senior associate professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, where he led the Applied Dreams initiative: collaborative innovation workshops with industry leaders such as Mattel, Sony, Hitachi, Nokia, Alcatel, Orange, Fiat and Telecom Italia.

In his work Jan-Christoph focuses specifically on people?s experience of mobile services and applications, and on using information technology to support simplicity, and advocates a strategic integration of user experience modeling, design, prototyping and iterative testing to improve the desirability of products and services.

Originally from Germany, he lived for many years in the USA, where he taught at RISD, and was director of information architecture for Sapient (New York), and senior designer at Sony Design Center USA, responsible for strategic product development. He holds four patents.

Zoels received his Master Degrees in Industrial Design from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA, and the Academy for Art and Design in Berlin, Germany. He has taught at Domus, Rhode Island School of Design, the Jan Van Eyck Academy (Maastricht, Netherlands), and Samsung's Innovative Design Laboratory (Seoul, Korea).

Experientia provides two types of services:
- a qualitative understanding of the people who might use a product or service (people-focused foresight, user experience modelling such as ethnographic research, contextual inquiry, development of user profiles and personas, etc.)
- taking this "people insight" forward into design and product development (through techniques such as opportunity modelling, idea generation, scenario development and concept visualisations), which we then prototype and test.

Though only founded two years ago, Experientia is already working with Conde Nast, Fererro, FidelityInternational, Finmeccanica, Kodak, Nokia, Haier, ResearchInMotion, Samsung, Swisscom, Tre Spade and Vodafone.

Please check out also our innovation and user experience blog: Putting People First