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People  •  Art + Design  •  Lecturer

Paul Kahn

Paul Kahn is an Experience Design lecturer at Northeastern. He specializes in solving large information problems, shaping and designing collections of digital information to improve user experience. He is constantly looking for the difference that makes a difference, the threshold of acceptance, the patterns that connect people to the information they need. Paul returned to the US in 2012 to join Mad*Pow after a decade working in the design community of Paris, France, where he created the first agency in France focused on information architecture, preceded by a decade leading Dynamic Diagrams in Providence RI. He retired from Mad*Pow and now devotes himself entirely to teaching and writing in the US and France.

His portfolio includes clients in the biomedical field, literary publishers, large cultural institutions and international corporations in the US and Europe. In recent years he has worked extensively in the US technology and healthcare sectors, improving patient experience and relieving information overload for practitioners and patients.

 

Research/Publications Highlights

  • Recent publications: “Medical Billing Thought Experiment” (http://bit.ly/2arnt83); “Pathways to ‘A Bill You Can Understand’: Lessons Learned from A Design and Innovation Challenge” (http://bit.ly/reportfindings); “Align and Combine, Customer Journey Mapping and COM-B Analysis to Aid Decision-Making During the Design Process” (DRS2018 forthcoming).
  • Contributions to design books: Information Architects, Understanding USA, Designing Universal Knowledge, Information Design Workbook, The Digital Turn and UX Storytellers.
  • Co-author: Mapping Websites, From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine

Departments

Art + Design

Education

  • BA, English Literature, Kenyon College

Professional Experience

  • Experience Design Director, Mad*Pow
  • Managing Director, Kahn+Associates
  • Chief Technology Officer, Ingenta
  • Vice President for Electronic Publishing, Cadmus Communications
  • President, Dynamic Diagrams
  • Director, Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship, Brown University
  • Senior Systems Analyst, Harvard University

Past Clients

  • IBM
  • Sun Microsystems
  • Netscape
  • Samsung
  • Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck
  • POL Editions
  • Bibliotheque national de France
  • Schlumberger
  • L’Oreal
  • AbbVie
  • GE Healthcare

Research Focus

  • Experience Design
  • Data Visualization
  • Information Architecture
  • information design

Courses Taught

  • Information Design History
  • MFA Thesis Exhibition
  • Design of Information-Rich Environments
  • Data Visualization During the COVID-19 Pandemic
  • Experience Design Studio 1