Design Matters Today with Gong Szeto 03.20.09

Joining me today on Design Matters with Debbie Millman is Gong Szeto.

Gong Szeto recently served as the Director of Design and Product Design at PEAK6 Investments, LP, a proprietary equity options trading firm, hedge fund, and new financial services business incubator based in Chicago. He recently designed OptionsHouse, a next-generation retail equity options brokerage, garnering top in category in design and usability in Barron's in 2008 and 2009. He was formerly Chief Creative Officer of publicly traded Rare Medium, Inc. and Principal at New York-based i/o 360 digital design, inc. Gong has lectured world-wide, and is a recipient of numerous awards from The Art Director's Club, American Center of Design, Net Tech, CASIE, and was included in I.D. Magazine's ID40 Top 40 Designers in the U.S. and Europe in 1996. He has work in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt Museum.

Gomg is a career-entrepreneur, most recently launching the OptionsHouse retail brokerage with PEAK6, and co-developing the Moon Units Live/Work urban infill development in Austin, TX as Partner at Szeto Brothers Ventures, Inc. He holds a U.S. Patent in on-demand interactive advertising in digital television, co-invented with Sony Corporation of America. He has served on the National Boards of the AIGA and the Van Alen Institute for Public Architecture. He received a B.Arch ('91) in Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture and Planning, and has studied Business, Finance, Economics, and Intellectual Property Law at NYU Stern School of Management Extension School, and Harvard Business School Executive Education Program.

Gong lives in Santa Fe, NM with his wife Bonnie Schwartz, daughter Willow. Gong recently resigned his position at PEAK6 to found FURY, LLC, a completely bootstrapped platform upon which he will undertake with collaborators applying everything he knows in designing open tools and business models for gigantic migraine-inducing macro-world problems. He calls it "Open Source Design," what he believes is Design's next great frontier.


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