Instructors
LUMA Instructors come from a variety of backgrounds. But all are experienced practitioners and highly qualified teachers of Human-Centered Design.
Joe Ballay
Joe is a nationally recognized industrial designer, founder and principal of MAYA Design and a former senior faculty member in the Department of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. As the head of the department, he was instrumental in orienting CMU’s design programs toward integrating high technology with traditional graphic and industrial design.
David Bishop
David heads up the Human Sciences group at MAYA Design. As an interaction designer, he is particularly interested in the positive effects that come from having the fortitude to resist feature creep and the insistence to focus on features that users truly need.
John Crowley
John is director of Engineering for MAYA Design. He has provided Human-Centered Design services for such clients as Bayer Healthcare, Eaton Corporation, Panasonic Automotive, General Dynamics, CIBA VISION, and others.
Amy Ferchak
Amy is an interaction designer. She currently works at MAYA Design. Product interfaces, web sites, and even documents become easier to use after Amy applies traditional and adaptive research and usability testing to discover needs and to uncover problem areas. She’s an excellent teacher too!
Francine Gemperle
Francine is a Designer and Researcher with MAYA’s Human Sciences Group. Francine is an expert in human-centered design methods and their application in a variety of complex situations for MAYA’s military and industrial clients. Francine holds a Master of Design from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and an Industrial Design BFA also from from CMU.
Greg Gibilisco
Greg is a designer at MAYA and the president of the Pittsburgh Chapter of AIGA, the professional association for design. At MAYA he has worked with clients such as Bayer Healthcare, Emerson Process Management, Fisher Scientific, General Dynamics and Whirlpool. Prior to joining MAYA, he worked as an associate creative director at The Bank of New York Mellon, where he managed a team of designers focused on corporate design and branding. Greg holds a Masters degree in communication from Duquesne University and a Bachelor of Science degree in graphic design from La Roche College.
Paul Gould
Paul Gould designs products and services in which people accomplish their goals with confidence and satisfaction. As a both a designer at MAYA and an instructor with LUMA Institute, he works with clients in diverse domains — healthcare, energy, finance, defense, consumer products, trade-shows, and public organizations — to make complex information and interactions clear by first understanding human motivations, capabilities, needs, and contexts of use. He has taught human-centered design methods such as ethnographic research, information architecture, and prototyping to corporate clients and in public schools. Paul also speaks at conferences and workshops about topics related to the intersection of design, human experience, and strategic innovation.
Kevin Hoffman
Kevin is a senior software engineer for MAYA Design. He not only designs prototypes and tames complex user interfaces, he also seeks to understand how people work so that those interfaces help people do a better job.
Bill Lucas
Bill investigates, informs, and advances the practice of Human-Centered Design. He has years of experience developing curricula in HCD, as well as teaching and applying it. He is a frequent speaker and writer on design topics and a former communication designer for Corning. Bill is currently a Fellow at MAYA Design.
Dutch MacDonald
Dutch is a registered architect in both Pennsylvania and New York and currently COO for MAYA Design Inc. He practiced architecture for more than 17 years, and was most recently vice president at EDGE Studio, one of the Pittsburgh region’s most respected and creative architectural practices. Along the way, he became fascinated with what sets great creative firms apart operationally and how business can use design thinking as a differentiator.
Pete Maher
As director of operations for LUMA Institute, Pete is responsible for managing operational and business development efforts, serving as an instructor, and experimenting with finding new ways to help our clients “make things better”. Pete brings with him a career-long passion for helping companies design amazing experiences that measurably improve business performance.
Mickey McManus
Mickey is president and CEO of MAYA Design. Before joining MAYA, Mick was co-founder and senior vice president of creative vision and strategy at élan communications, an integrated communications consultancy for clients that included Bristol Myers Squibb, MasterCard, Samsung, Nortel Networks, TiVO, and Janssen Pharmaceutica. Mick is a frequent speaker on the need to include the human element in the design of products and services. He was a keynote speaker at the 2009 Economist CIO Forum, at ECEF in 2007, and an invited speaker at both the 2007 Smart Services Forum presented by Harbor Research and at the 2006 World Healthcare Innovation and Technology Congress in Washington, D.C.
Rick McMullen
Rick graduated with honors from Carnegie-Mellon University with a B.S. in cognitive science and human-computer interaction, and stayed on to complete a Master’s in human-computer interaction. He is currently a researcher and interaction designer for MAYA Design. He brings a strong understanding of research methods and technology to LUMA workshops, and has an inherent curiosity about who people are and why they do what they do.
James P. “Pat” O’Neil
James “Pat” O’Neal is a retired 2-star general with 30 years of service in the United States Army. Spanning the period from 1969 to 1999, Pat served in critical command positions and as a faculty member of West Point. His service includes duty in the Republic of Vietnam, the Federal Republic of Germany, Bosnia, Croatia, Hungary, and the United States. He has a masters degree in Organizational Psychology from the University of Tennessee. He is co-founder of the Broad River Group, LLC.
Chris Pacione
As director of LUMA Institute, Chris leads a highly skilled, multidisciplinary team of practitioners and educators who are passionate about helping everyone “make things better.” Chris is a frequent speaker and writer on the topic of design and education and has years of experience as both an entrepreneur and educator.
Marc Peterson
Marc brings more than a decade of experience in graphic, environment, event, advertising, and brand design to LUMA workshops. He is currently the visual design director for MAYA Design. Before joining MAYA, Marc directed the Visual Media Department of élan communications, which he helped to establish in 1995. He integrated customer experiences from the smallest design details to overall message platforms for clients such as MasterCard, Audi, Motorola, Texaco, TRW, Bayer Diagnostics, B. Braun Medical, Panasonic, PPG, IBM, and Ford Motor Company.
Mike Sabatini
Mike is an engineer for MAYA Design and a recent University of Pittsburgh computer science graduate. He has worked on several commercial and defense projects, including target management/tracking, terrain pathfinding, and personal location awareness.
Katie Minardo Scott
Katie holds a BFA in Design and a master’s in human-computer interaction, both from Carnegie Mellon. She joined MAYA Design after a three-year stint at The MITRE Corporation, a government research and development center in Boston. She is also contributing editor for “Interactions,” an ACM magazine focused on design practitioners. Katie has built a diverse portfolio of projects, using human-centered methods to develop a gesture interface for cars, refine medical software for cardiologists, conduct field research with soldiers, and build visualization tools for intelligence analysts.
Steve Spencer
Steve recently graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a bachelor’s degree in industrial design and psychology. He can sew, weld, blow glass, and make furniture. He also used to design and machine lab apparatus, and is always working on someone’s car. There isn’t anything Steve can’t make.
Jon West
Jon is a senior analyst with MAYA design. He especially enjoys the challenge of reducing complex processes to their essential elements so that they can be rendered in a more usable and scalable way.