Margeigh Novotny

Margeigh Novotny leads the interaction design practice across Smart Design's San Francisco, New York, and Barcelona offices. She is working to introduce entrepreneurial thinking into the day-to-day operations of a traditional design consultancy by looking at business models for supplementing work-for-hire revenue streams with internally developed product and service ideas.

She has recently been involved in bringing "extreme affordability" thinking to first-world product development; as studio leader for social entrepreneurship at the recent International Design Summit at Aspen, Margeigh initiated Smart's collaboration with International Development Enterprises, a nongovernmental agency that develops products to help improve productivity and increase income for dollar-a-day families in rural Burma.

Originally trained and practicing as an architect, Margeigh has always had a deep interest in the ways that technology transforms how we design and inhabit physical space, and how these new behaviors transform our sense of ourselves and our relationships with others. Her transition from environmental design to the design of product and service experiences began in the early 1990s with a commission from Interval Research to create a multimedia road show around an extensive consumer anthropology research project. This exhibition, The Electric Carnival, traveled with the 1994 Lollapalooza tour.

In the mid-1990s she was hired by Colossal Pictures to create 3D virtual sets for a top-secret television project, a request that evolved into a four-year engagement developing an advanced interactive television platform for the client, Disney Imagineering. As creative director at Colossal Pictures, Margeigh directed many projects for emerging technology companies and network television clients.

Since joining Smart Design in 2002 she has designed several first-of-category products and services, including the Kaleidescape home media server and an in-store digital music service for Starbucks / Hear Music. Margeigh and team recently designed an exhibition for the Exploratorium's Invisible Dynamics project, which launched at the ZeroOne / ISEA festival in San Jose in 2006. This installation featured a collection of art/science projects based on geo-annotation technologies.

Margeigh lives with her husband and three children in a salt marsh preserve in Marin County.

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