User Experience (UX) Design

Asma is a Design Professor and thorough Creative with a history of working in the innovation and design industry and higher education both. Her forte is Interaction Design, Experience Design, UI, Design Thinking, Visual Design, Storytelling and tinkering with other emerging design and multimedia practices. Her classroom is more like a playing field with two way communication of thoughts, ideas and design process based in empathy and creative problem solving.

Asma has worked internationally and locally for more than a decade doing advertising and design. Her portfolio includes various multinational brands and tech start ups. Besides digital media, some of her interests that add soulfulness to her work and class environment are inclusive design and culture, teaching yoga and spirituality.

As a professor teaching in the user experience and game programs, Vishaal joins Humber College after an extensive and varied career as a user experience (UX) practitioner. Vishaal has worked in the healthcare, consulting, banking, e-commerce and software industry in both UX designer and researcher roles. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Industrial Engineering) from Ryerson University, a Masters of Engineering (Human Factors/UX Specialization) from the University of Toronto. Vishaal uses storytelling as part of this teaching to engage and immerse students in the classroom with a strong focus on active learning and industry case studies.

When it comes to your interactions with innovative technology, Andrew has always believed you are more than a user. Over his lengthy career, he’s proven time and again that technology has the power to connect people through storytelling and shared emotional experiences. An award-winning designer, creative technologist, creative director, and now an instructor at Humber, Andrew seeks to use design to make the world a better place, not just for users but humans, too.

George Paravantes (MFA IxD) is a product interaction designer and faculty member of the User Experience Design graduate certificate program. As an interaction design instructor, his areas of expertise are in mobile interaction design, human-centred design research, motion graphics, multimodal interactions in augmented and virtual reality. His industry experience encompasses both interaction design and industrial design.

George holds a Master of Fine Arts in Interaction Design from the Umea Institute of Design in Sweden. His final thesis research work explored the mobile context within the connected car experiences. This work was done in collaboration with Nokia Helsinki and Volkswagen Germany.

George’s international work experience includes Research In Motion, Nokia Finland, Volkswagen Germany, Drive Design UK, along with various consulting work with both mobile and AI startsups in Toronto. His pursuit of innovation was recognized as co-inventor of two user interface patents for Volkswagen’s connected electric vehicle car concepts. Along with his students, he was recognized with a League of Innovation Award for interaction design work on an educational marking app. Recently he was recognized with fellow faculty member Dennis Kappen for Humber's 2019 Research Excellence Award for their work researching the user experience and interaction design of augmented reality within the context of autonomous systems. They have published a research paper and built prototypes on this topic and recently presented with the students at the AutoUI 2018 industry conference.

As a User Experience (UX) practitioner with over 25 years experience in the field, I’m excited to bring my passion and experience to my new role at Humber College.

My own journey in UX started at the University of Toronto, where I majored in cognitive psychology and minored in anthropology and industrial engineering. My interests led me to pursue a master's degree at the University College London in ergonomics.

Since then, I’ve worked at the Department of National Defence in human factors research, media and design agencies, consulting firms, and started my own UX consulting firm in 2013. I’ve completed hundreds of client projects. The industries I’ve worked in span real estate, food and hospitality, government, financial institutions, retail, telecommunications, education, healthcare, automotive, entertainment, non-profit, and others. I enjoy public speaking and have spoken at CanUX, The IA Summit, Euro IA, and the UPA.

My personal areas of interest include UX research, service design, design for the greater good, continuous improvement, personal growth, upstream thinking, decision making, and problem solving. My vision for my students intersects my areas of interest--exactly. My goal is to help coach the next generation of design thinkers to solve wicked, complex, and seemingly impossible problems.

Cynthia has over 25 years of industry experience in strategy and leadership roles in publishing, marketing and advertising with a core focus in content, audience and systems thinking. She spent six years as head of audience for The Globe and Mail newspaper re-engineering the user experience in news and connecting the newsroom to the analytics departments by teaching journalists how to see their value to the audience. Her master’s thesis, Audience Design Thinking, researched how design thinking was used to frame audience news reading behaviors and reading patterns with the value of news readers' attention. This thesis is part of a global Google News initiative teaching on design thinking and systems thinking for newsrooms.

Cynthia has been part of Humber’s teaching community since 2017 and is now the program co-ordinator and a teaching professor for both the Content Strategy graduate certificate and the User Experience Design graduate certificate.  When not walking her dog, she can be found with her head in a book, her hand with a brush painting, doodling, or gardening if the sun is out.