MAYA Design Hires Education Director to Start New Venture Devoted to Design Literacy

MAYA Design Hires Education Director to Start New Venture Devoted to Design
Literacy

PITTSBURGH, Sept. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- MAYA Design, which has been developing
a suite of design-education products and services, has named Chris Pacione,
previously with BodyMedia, Inc., director of advanced development, education.
Pacione will lead a venture devoted to the emerging need for design thinking
in organizations.
"My job is to incubate our educational offering and ultimately spin off a
new company that not only will satisfy the growing need for human-centered
design in product-focused organizations, but it also will satisfy the need for
design literacy in any organization," said Pacione, who defines design as the
discipline of bringing about intentional change through the making of "some
thing."
"Everything -- from consumer products to public policy -- is fundamentally
designed," said Pacione. "Because design is universal, design methodology can
benefit many aspects of an organization, not just product development, and
eventually separate the winners from the losers."
MAYA currently provides an intensive three-day boot camp in human-centered
design methodologies. The course is for senior marketing managers, engineers
and thought leaders in companies wanting to move beyond a product-centered
approach in order to drive innovation and to satisfy the needs of their
customers.
"Chris is an innovative and strategic thinker with a passion for achieving
positive societal change through education," said Mickey McManus, MAYA's
president and CEO. "MAYA believes that people can learn how to think like
designers, and that it is imperative for businesses to become learning
organizations in this accelerating economy. Chris also understands the value
of our mission as human-centered designers to separate the important from the
arbitrary for greater return on investment."
Pacione cofounded BodyMedia, Inc., where he led interaction design and
customer marketing. His main responsibilities were the creation and design of
the company's clinical and consumer product offerings.
Before cofounding BodyMedia, Pacione was an assistant professor in the
School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, where he developed new
curriculum and taught courses in human-computer interaction, interface design,
information design and drawing. In earlier years, he worked at Fitch
Richardson & Smiths' Exploratory Design Lab as an interface and interaction
designer.
Pacione has an undergraduate degree in design from Carnegie Mellon
University and a master's degree in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He
holds several IDEA Gold Medal Awards sponsored by BusinessWeek and the
Industrial Designers Society of America.
MAYA has spun off two companies, most recently Rhiza Labs. The first, MAYA
Viz, was bought by General Dynamics in 2005. Since its founding in 1989, MAYA
has been dedicated to taming complexity by improving the interactions between
people and information technology. Through its human-centered research and
commercial design practices, it helps companies and organizations to take
advantage of the great market potential for innovative, highly usable products
and services. For more information visit http://www.maya.com.
MAYA(R) and Taming Complexity(R) are registered trademarks of MAYA Design,
Inc.
SOURCE MAYA Design, Inc.

Susan Salis of MAYA Design, Inc., +1-412-488-2900, Salis@maya.com