Hello and welcome.

If you have arrived at this page, then you already know a little something about me.

I am an MIT Media Lab graduate, creative technologist and serial entrepreneur. I am presently a Cofounder & CEO of Phenomena, a STEM-focused educational technology company. Previously, I cofounded Potion Design (a National Design Award finalist), Popplet and Perch Interactive. I also started a small company named eeiioo to create educational apps for iOS.

I believe that creativity is as essential to engineering as it is to the arts, and that the freedom to invent (and reinvent) is fundamental to the success of every organization.

 

What do I do?

I like to wear many hats. I wear some of them better than others. Here’s a quick summary.

My Best Hats
Creative Technology Leadership
Experience Design
Physical + Digital Interfaces
Educational Technology
Innovation Strategy

Second Best Hats
Software Development
Computer Graphics
Information Architecture
Retail Innovation
Business Development

My Other Hats
Startup Fundraising
Budgeting & Modeling
Public Speaking
Computer Vision
Industrial Design

 

What have I made?

I have been fortunate to work with and lead teams of exceptional designers and developers. Here are a handful of projects that I am proud to have led the making of:

What else about me?

For the especially curious, here’s my life story, not including all the wonderful people I’ve known and learned from along the way.

  • I grew up in Los Altos, California. No one knew about Los Altos until the Steve Jobs book came out. Their famous garage was in Los Altos. We lived quite close to Xerox Parc, where the mouse, the GUI and the laser printer were all invented.

  • I attended Pinewood School for every year but third grade. My two great mentors were Benjamin Blake, my elementary school art teacher, and David Foresti, my high school physics teacher.

  • I majored in Computer Science & Engineering at MIT. That’s Course 6.3 in MIT speak. My minor was in Mathematics. That’s Course 18.

  • While at MIT, I was part of Roadkill Buffet, the premiere improv group of MIT. I designed the logo for the performance group which is still in use today.

  • Following my four years as an undergraduate, I spent two more at the MIT Media Lab, in John Maeda’s Aesthetics & Computation Group. Here’s my personal ACG home page. My master’s thesis on visual programming languages can be found here.

  • After the Media Lab, I taught 9th Grade Math & Physics at High Tech High in San Diego. I left San Diego after realizing that I don’t actually like the beach. I moved to Brooklyn in July 2003. I was 26 years old.

  • I lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, for fifteen years — thirteen of those years in the same apartment near 6th Ave and Sterling. I took the Q every day to Canal Street, where both Potion and Perch’s office were located.

  • I spent my first two years in New York freelancing and building the Pond, which was the world’s first general-purpose round interactive table. During this time, I also joined and then led a sketch comedy troupe which performed at UCB, the PIT and many other seedy comedy venues in lower Manhattan.

  • In 2005, I co-founded Potion Design with Phillip Tiongson. Phillip and I were invited to the White House twice (in 2009 and 2010) as finalists for the National Design Award in the category of Interaction Design. Potion also created the first permanent interactive installation at the The Met.

  • In 2012, I spun off Perch Interactive from Potion. Perch is a venture-funded startup focused on interactive displays for the retail environment. I filed two patents for Perch, both of which relate to sensing customer interactions with physical products.

  • In the fall of 2018, after a delightful month in Porto, I moved to Seattle with my wife and two children. The reason for the move was so that our children would know trees and to be closer to our Amazon deliveries.

  • I play guitar, though not particularly well. I once did a lot of oil painting. I also know how to unicycle.

 

Where can you find me?

You can find me here on LinkedIn, here on Twitter and here on Instagram. You can also reach me via email at (my first name) @ jaredschiffman.com.