Who We Are
Jason Tester
Research Director, Human-Future Interaction
Follow Jason on Twitter: @guerillafutures
Jason Tester's interests in interactive technology began the old-fashioned way, tinkering one-on-one with the equipment he had at hand. With his work on technological voting, however, he saw the possible effects of computer-human interaction on the future of society as a whole.
At IFTF, Jason focuses on three areas: research into how people use emerging technologies, the application of design to futures research, and facilitating groups to stimulate insights and implications about the future. Jason strives to look beneath the surface of society and its artifacts for hidden layers of meaning.
Jason has long been interested in researching and designing the ways people interact with technology, expertise he brought to IFTF's ongoing effort to broaden the ways in which its findings are visualized and presented. To this end, he developed one of IFTF's current methodologies called “artifacts from the future.” Most recently, he has been interested in moving futures thinking out of the think tanks and into the street by developing a platform called human–future interaction. Such a platform is designed to make futures thinking part of daily life by using immersive experiences and new media tools to provoke and capture citizens' thoughts about the future.
Before IFTF, Jason was in the founding class at the Interactive Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy, where he undertook the “Accelerated Democracy” project, a series of scenarios that uniquely illustrate potential future—positive and negative—for technological voting. This project has been widely featured in the press and formed the basis of his focus on new methods for integrating design with long-term futures research. When he was at Stanford, Jason helped found the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, the only research and design group focused on the new field of persuasive technologies—technologies that influence users' thoughts or activities as they use them.
Jason holds a B.S. in human–computer interaction design from Stanford University, and a master's degree from the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy.
Contact at jtester [at] iftf.org
Or on Twitter at @guerillafutures