Aza Raskin

Aza Raskin is the CEO of Massive Health

Named the 2011 Master of Design and a one of the top 40 influential designers by Fast Company, Aza is the founder and CEO of Massive Health, and was until recently Creative Lead for Firefox and a founding member of Mozilla Labs. In 2012, he was named to both Inc and Forbes 30-under-30. Aza has founded and sold two companies, including Songza.com which is currently one of the top music apps on the app store. He also creates modular cardboard furniture called Bloxes which are used everywhere from Google to Twitter.

In another life, Aza has done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated in math and physics.

The Most Harmful Profession

In the early 1970’s prophetic designer Victor Papanek wrote, “There are professions more harmful than design, but only a few of them.” That’s more true now than it was 40 years ago: Never have so few people, so young, had such direct impact on so many. Our decisions as designers directly affect billions. We give people email apnea—causing people to literally hold their breath. We’ve made social media more addictive than cigarettes with the top minds of our generation working to distracting us, all in the name of monetizing those lucrative eyeballs. But it’s not all bad: To design is to cause behaviour change, and behaviour change is the solution to this centuries top-five diseases. “The Most Harmful Profession” is an exploration of the harm and the hope for design in an Internet-scale world.

Slides

http://uxlondon.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/slides/the-most-harmful-profession.pdf

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