Northwest Design Profile: Nikki Pfarr of Artefact

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Concept Camera: The WVIL from Artefact on Vimeo.

Nikki Pfarr is a Senior Design Strategist at Artefact and a former Ph.D. Candidate at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. She is a founding partner of the Brains, Behavior & Design Group, and was previously a UX Designer at Google. Nikki holds a Master's of Design from IIT’s Institute of Design and a B.S. from MIT. She has led workshops on incorporating behavioral economics into user-centered design for the IIT Institute of Design Executive Education summer camp series, the Chicago chapter of the IxDA, and various Artefact clients. Nikki's original research on the implications of behavioral economics on design research practices was published in the 2010 Conference Proceedings of the International Design Research Society.
Nikki Pfarr, Senior Design Strategist at Artefact 


Nikki will be speaking at the IDSA Western Design Dialogue Conference 2012 in Seattle, May 4th and 5th. 
Here's what she will be discussing:


Designing for the "Irrational" Brain

As humans, we don't always make rational decisions - we volunteer to work for free, we don't max out our retirement savings, or we opt for pizza instead of salad.  It turns out human decision making can be influenced by a variety of seemingly irrelevant factors, which ultimately lead us to do things that may not be in our best interests. The field of behavioral economics, grounded in cognitive psychology, helps us understand how and why irrational behavior occurs. This is of tremendous value to designers, particularly as design evolves from focusing on aesthetics and usability to facilitating positive behavior change. Nikki Pfarr will provide an introduction to behavioral economics as a tool that can help designers better understand human behavior, craft solutions that will be more effective at eliciting certain behaviors, and more accurately predict how users will respond when faced with new choices.

More speakers will be featured here and listed on the IDSA website.

To learn more about the conference check the IDSA site page here.
Save money by registering before April 20th.

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