Adam Richardson
Strategy Director
frog design
Adam is responsible for overseeing many of frog’s strategy engagements for product, digital and brand clients. He combines a background in industrial design, interaction design, and sociology and has a broad range of experience in both consulting and corporate settings. Clients have included DaimlerChrysler, HP, Microsoft, Motorola, Oral-B, Sun Microsystems, Vodafone, and Yahoo. He has extensive experience conducting ethnographic research to discover user needs, and with making research and strategy insights that connect concretely with product development. Prior to frog he ran his own consulting company, and has worked at Sun Microsystems (lead designer for high end servers) and Praxis Product Design (senior designer).
Adam earned a BFA in Industrial Design from the California College of the Arts (CCA) in 1992, and earned a multi-disciplinary MA from the University of Chicago in 1997, where his thesis focused on applying analytical tools from anthropology and sociology to the design process. He has written for design magazines such as Design Management Journal, Graphis, Metropolis, and Innovation. He has spoken at multiple conferences, most recently: About, With & For (Chicago, 2005), Netherlands Technology Officers Conference (Delft, 2005), Spark UX (Half Moon Bay, 2006). He has won ID Magazine and Good Design Awards, and he helped organize a show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1996 about the design of desktop computers. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Industrial Design program at CCA, where he has taught design research.
