Christopher Noessel
Christopher Noessel is a veteran of the interaction design industry, having designed products, crafted services, and helped clients with design strategy across many disparate domains for more than 20 years. In that time, he co-founded a small interaction design agency where he developed interactive exhibitions and environments for museums. He worked as a director of information design at international Web consultancy marchFIRST, where he also helped establish the interaction design Center of Excellence. For ten years, he worked with a boutique interaction design agency in San Francisco, where he led the “generator” half of that practice. For a time he was Design Principal at IBM, running the Design for AI guild to help equip that community of practice with world-class skills and tools.
Christopher was one of the founding graduates of the now-passing-into legend Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy, where his thesis project was a comprehensive service design for lifelong learners called Fresh. The project was presented at the MLearn conference in London in 2003. He has since helped to visualize the future of counterterrorism as a freelancer, built prototypes of coming technologies for Microsoft, and designed telehealth devices to accommodate the crazy facts of modern health care.
Christopher has written for online publications for many years, but was first published in print as co-author of the interaction design pattern chapter in the textbook edited by Simson Garfinkel, RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy. His Spidey sense goes off at random topics, and this has led him to speak at conferences around the world about a wide range of things, including interactive narrative, ethnographic user research, interaction design, sex-related interactive technologies, free-range learning, the future of tech, and the relationship between science fiction and interface design with the 2012 Rosenfeld Media book Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction, coauthored with Nathan Shedroff. He is keeper of the blog scifiinterfaces.com and has run related sci-fi movie nights all over the world. In 2014 he co-authored the 4th Edition of About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, helping modernize it for the six years that had passed since its prior release. His most recent book, Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People (Rosenfeld 2017), describes the newest mode of interaction made possible by artificial intelligence.
If you run into him on the street and want to get an earful, ask about any of the handful of other books he’s got rattling around in his head. One involves the strange and wonderful world of generative randomness, and another involves the design of technology that helps its users get smart enough to not need it.
Presentations
UX Camp Spring 2025
Over-reliance and deskilling: 2 long-term AI problems (and what designers can do about it)
AI is full of promise for users, but it introduces risk as well. The two we’ll talk about in this session are over-reliance and deskilling. Over-reliance is when users trust an AI’s output too much. Deskilling is when users lose skills they previously had, but handed off to the AI; with implications not just for users but for labor relations as well. The good news is that you as a designer can do something about each of these. Come hear Christopher Noessel introduce the problems, share examples (including two from pop culture: beloved Australian show Bluey, and Carol Beers from Little Britain), and walk us through the patterns we can implement to help take some of the sting out of AI.
