Jon Kolko is a designer and educator based in Austin, Texas. He is currently Vice President of Consumer Design at Blackboard, joining the company via its acquisition of myEdu, a startup focused on helping college students succeed and get jobs. Kolko is also the Founder and Director of the Austin Center for Design.
Previously, Kolko worked in design roles at Austin-based venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and taught design as a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).
Kolko has authored four books: Well Designed: How to use Empathy to Create Products People Love, published by Harvard Business Review Press in November, 2014; Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, published by Austin Center for Design; Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner's Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis, published by Oxford University Press; and Thoughts on Interaction Design, published by Morgan Kaufmann;
Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.