Full biography of Jan-Christoph Zoels

Jan-Christoph Zoels is a senior partner of Experientia, an experience and service design company based in Italy. Experientia’s mission is helping companies to innovate their products, services and processes by creating valuable user experiences.

Until recently he was Senior Associate Professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. His design research there focused on the user experience of mobile telecommunications devices and services. Classes taught included 50 Ways to Understand a User, Designing Desire and Strategic Design: Putting People First. He lead the Applied Dreams initiative: collaborative innovation workshops with industry leaders such as Sony, Hitachi, Nokia, Alcatel, Orange, Fiat and Telecom Italia.

As a lead researcher for Design for Future Needs, a European Commission project, he demonstrated how design thinking could be used for policy planning, especially the EU’s science and technology policies and its strategic planning of industrial R&D programmes. He led the design team for the Future of Train Travel for Trenitalia and shaped the “Mobile Embodiments” project in imaging new mobile applications.

Previously a Director of Information Architecture Sapient, Jan-Christoph Zoels was responsible for strategic direction, creative scope and integrating various dimensions of the user experience. He realised online projects for the MD Consult Cardiology unit of Harcourt Brace, Goldman Sachs, Lucent and Cablevision. As creative lead for the mobile practice of Sapient he designed mobile applications for Verizon.

Prior, Zoels was Senior Designer at Sony Design Center USA responsible for strategic product development. He developed concepts for Sony’s PDA Clie, Electronic Music Distribution and various interface designs for interactive TV and remote controls. He currently 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 Rhode Island School of Design, the Jan Van Eyck Academy (Maastricht, Netherlands), and Samsung’s Innovative Design Laboratory (Seoul, Korea).

In his consulting activities he specialises on foresight scenarios, design and service concepts. Recent clients include Nokia, Adidas, Vodafone, BMW and EliasArts. Zoels is an external mentor for the Center for Product Design in Health Care at Halmstad University, Sweden. During the last three years, he was a keynote speaker at BMW’s Marketing Innovation Lab Forum in Munich, Germany, at Banff’s New Media Institute and at multiple conferences.