Jared Spool creates a human bar chart with some of the attendees of MX 2010. Stay tuned for video of his talk within the coming days.

Overflow tickets are $995 and there aren’t many, so get yours now! Right HERE.

What’s your plan for the near future? If you’re like most in our field, the path forward is murky and no one at your office is handing out maps. We’ll look at the trends and tactics that matter, so you can make your own map for moving ahead.

PRESENTATION SLIDES ARE HERE: The Near Future

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Brandon Schauer, program chair and your host at MX, is an experience design director for Adaptive Path. He speaks, writes, trains, and practices experience design as a differentiator for business strategy.

Brandon’s passion for finding and understanding the unmet needs of customers has led him to diverse environments, from the homes of cancer patients to tunnels beneath Walt Disney World. This insight with customers — plus a solid grounding in business analysis and a mastery of design methods — allows Brandon to help organizations define and design more meaningful experiences for their customers.

Brandon has over a decade of experience developing new products, services, and user experiences for the web, desktop, and devices. He’s keynoted, presented, and conducted workshops at such conferences at Business to Buttons, IA Summit, Designertopia, and UIE Web App Summit.

Brandon holds two master-level degrees from schools with the Illinois Institute of Technology. He received a Master of Design from the Institute of Design in Chicago where he studied the planning, development, and management of innovation. Concurrently, he graduated with a MBA from the Stuart School of Business. Brandon is a past editor for the Institute of Design’s Perspectives on Design and Strategy, allowing him to pick-the-brains of leaders in the fields of innovation, design, and strategy. He’s also co-author of Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World and was recently included in Business Week’s “Twenty-One People Who Will Change Business” round up.

He also has a love of Excel that is unnatural for a designer.

This session also features Eric Hellweg, editor of HBR online.

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Brian Cronin has enabled organizations to deliver on customer expectations by identifying user needs, developing a design strategy that aligns with business goals and developing designs that create differentiation from the competition. At Adaptive Path, Brian has delivered 17 projects, including its largest and most conceptual work. Some examples are: the interface and desktop manager application for a touchscreen e-ink reader, a concept prototype for a mobile operating system for a large mobile handset manufacturer, mobile and web learning platforms, and financial management web applications, among others. Having worked within the constraints of technology, time and budget for over a decade, Brian is a proven team leader in bringing new ideas into the world.

In addition to piloting projects to successful completion, Brian has coordinated Adaptive Path’s sustainable design practice and programs to fulfill the Designer’s Accord (joined in January of 2008). He recently developed and chaired the program for Adaptive Path’s “Managing Design Projects 2009″ conference which was hailed by attendee Kia Zokaie, PMP, as “more practical project management knowledge than a PMP”.

Craig Butler is the VP of the Experience Systems group at AAA of Northern California, Nevada, & Utah.  His passion for providing productive experiences for customers, users of web apps and frontline employees of internal systems has driven his building of a team that is unique among “old school” businesses.

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Craig Butler is the VP of the Experience Systems group at AAA of Northern California, Nevada, and Utah. His passion for providing productive experiences for customers, users of web apps and frontline employees of internal systems has driven his building of a team that is unique among “old school” businesses. The Experience Systems group houses the functional areas of eBusiness and Customer Relationship Management and the design teams for online and screen-based User Experience, Interaction Design, and Customer Experience (across multiple channels).  Before working at AAA, Craig helped eBay build its first online dispute resolution platform and was also part of Bank of America’s online banking product management team.

Heather Champ is very much enamored with personal publishing on the web, having launched her first home page in ‘94 while working at Princeton University. Previously, she curated the Mirror Project and co-founded JPG Magazine with her husband, Derek Powazek. An award winning web designer, Heather abandoned her career as a pixel pusher to join the Flickr team at Yahoo! as Community Manager in May 2005. At the end of the day, she’d much rather be outside taking photos.

Dan Saffer is a founder and principal at the design consultancy Kicker Studio. Dan has designed devices, software, websites, and services since 1995, and these products are currently used by millions every day. An acclaimed speaker and author, his two books are Designing for Interaction (New Riders) and Designing Gestural Interfaces (O’Reilly). Dan is an internationally-recognized thought leader on design who has spoken at conferences and taught workshops on interaction design all over the world. He has a Masters of Design in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University, and his design innovations have received several patents.

Heidi Reinfeld is the Managing Creative Director of Sequence. She is passionate about directing and designing brand experiences for clients such as Chevron, Chipotle, Zinio and MySpace. Prior to Sequence, Heidi was the design director at Bank of America where she led visual design for bankofamerica.com, ATMs and kiosks. Before that she was at Studio Archetype and Sapient working on brand programs for Virgin, 3Com, Honda and many others.

This session also features Brian Cronin of Adaptive Path.

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Eric Hellweg is the Editor of the Harvard Business Review online. In this role, he manages the editorial operations of the site and oversees various elements of the print magazine as well. Eric has been straddling the print/digital divide for 15 years. Before joining HBR in 2006 as its first online editorial hire, he wrote a twice-weekly column for CNN.com, a regular column for MIT Technology Review, co-founded Business 2.0 magazine, and wrote for such publications as The New York Times, SPIN, Rolling Stone online, Wired, and others. He lives in Cambridge, MA but misses Sausalito.