Jane Ruffino
Jane is a research-driven UX content design consultant who has worked across a range of industries, including fintech, healthcare, mobility, HR tech, enterprise SaaS, travel tech, and retail, with clients across Europe, Asia, and North America. She’s been a journalist, documentary producer, and professional development educator. She is passionate about storytelling, plain language, and strong collaboration. With her one-person content studio, Character, she specializes in workshops and facilitation, but she’ll also happily write the words and stories that make your software go.
Jane is also pursuing a PhD on the contemporary archaeology of the undersea fiber optic cable network, giving Character a strong foundation in infrastructure-related projects, and extremely niche information. Originally from Boston, Jane spent much of her early career in Ireland, and currently lives in the Stockholm suburbs with her partner, an epic daughter, and adorable dog, Lusse (pronounced LOOS-seh).
Presentations
UX Camp Winter 2024
It Really is a Series of Tubes: UX and an Archaeology of the Internet
Almost all of our networked devices rely on a series of fewer than 500 fiber optic cables at the bottom of the sea. And, like all infrastructures, they’re simultaneously mundane artifacts and wonders of human achievement. If you’ve encountered these subsea cables, it might have been as a news story about breakage, or they were represented by an abstract map of connecting lines.
What happens when we try to understand something as invisible as “data” and as sprawling as the subsea cable network—and what does that have to do with designing stuff for screens?
Join us for a talk that weaves together UX and contemporary archaeology, to expose more of the real, human (often very analog) work that goes into making digital things go, from the pixels all the way to the pipes.
You won’t get a tidy new method to try right away. You’ll get a messy-by-design picture of what it can look like to think like an archaeologist about the things all around us—using a subsea cable research project as an example—and a dose of encouragement to sit with uncertainty and chaos for a little longer than is comfortable.
Tent Talks Session: Content is Infrastructure!
On Monday, December 18th at 12:00pm Central, Jane Ruffino joins us for a live Q&A session: “Content Is Infrastructure!”
