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Nikolai Cornell is an award-winning interactive creative director, experience designer, and producer whose work focuses on exploring the intersection between physical space and interaction design. His design research specialties include emerging technologies, display systems, physical interaction, and human-scale interfaces. Specifically, interactive experiences that abandon the use of a mouse in favor of a dynamic range of sensors that allow the human body to be used as an interactive input device.

He received his bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Virginia Tech in 1997 and spent two years working for FACE Architecture in San Francisco designing interior commercial and residential spaces, before turning his attention to the field of interaction design in 1999. He worked for several years as a web designer at Razorfish, helping to design and implement user interfaces for a large variety of clients, before leaving at the end of 2001 to pursue his own projects and attend the graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.

In 2004, Nikolai completed his MFA in Media Design with a thesis entitled: “Life-Size - A series of interactive installations that explore human-scale interaction, environmental interface and display systems.” His MFA thesis won a gold at the Art Directors Club (ADC) 84th Awards, a silver IDEA award from the IDSA, an iF communication design award, and was featured in the I.D. Student Design Review 2005 and the Communication Arts Interactive Design Annual 11.

For several years he was the director of interactive media at George P. Johnson in Los Angeles, CA, where he led a team that concepted, designed and developed a wide variety of different interactive installations and exhibits, all of which debuted at one of the four major North American auto shows.

Currently he works in San Francisco as the director of interactive media at Obscura Digital.




 
 
Energy (n) [en-er-jee] A source of dynamic inspiration for design.