Drew Bamford
Corporate Vice President
HTC Creative Labs
Drew Bamford’s Creative Labs team is responsible for executing on some of HTC’s most significant product design work. With with locations in Seattle, San Francisco and Taipei, this cross-cultural team has designed and developed interactive products including Sense 7, BlinkFeed, Zoe and the RE camera. Its current focus is on the future of fitness experiences in partnership with Under Armour and virtual reality experiences in partnership with Valve.
Before joining HTC in 2006, Bamford founded the user experience design practice at TEAGUE. He previously worked at Microsoft Corporation, IDEO and Silicon Graphics. Bamford holds a degree in product design from Stanford University.
Design in a Virtual World
Virtual Reality has been hyped as “the next big thing” since at least the 1980s and yet is has never lived up to its promise—until now. Drew Bamford feels we are finally beginning to see concepts that designers and engineers have abandoned in the past because of feasibility—reach the market as viable products. So what has changed?
Drawing from his years of experience as an innovative product designer as well as lessons learned from HTC’s own foray into VR with VIVE, Bamford of HTC Creative Labs will offer insight on this exciting new territory. What are the advances in the technology and consumer landscapes that make a consumer VR solution a viable product today? What new experiences will VR enable for consumers and for the designers who create them? What types of design problems will challenge the discipline going forward? Come prepared with your questions.
