Aza Raskin

Aza Raskin
Aza Raskin, 2005
Born	1984 (age 39–40) California, USA
Education	Math, Physics BoS (University of Chicago) Physics, Computation and Neural Systems Ph.D (Caltech, dropped out)
Occupation(s)	interface guru, entrepreneur
Parent(s)	Jef Raskin, Linda S. Blum
Website	http://www.azarask.in

Aza Raskin is a user experience and product design guru, founder of Humanized, Inc., Songza, and Bloxes, and President of the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces. He is currently Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs. He is the son of noted human-computer interface expert Jef Raskin.

Biography

Raskin gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 at the local San Francisco chapter of SIGCHI. By 20, he was speaking internationally. He holds bachelor degrees in math and physics from the University of Chicago. He attended Caltech briefly as a Ph.D. student in Physics, continuing the Dark Matter research he had participated in at both the University of Chicago and University of Tokyo. The University of Chicago was the only school Raskin ever completed, having left middle school, high school, and graduate school. He is also an accomplished international French Horn soloist.

In 2005 Aza Raskin founded Humanized. He currently leads the Raskin Center for Human Interfaces.

In November 2007, Raskin and Scott Robbin introduced Songza, a music meta-search tool showcasing innovative interface characteristics. In the week after launch, Songza was used to play over 1 million songs and has grown in popularity since then to become one of the major contenders in the online music space.

In 2008, Aza and other Humanized employees were part of a hire-out by the Mozilla Corporation, where he has been defining the direction for Firefox Mobile. On August 26, 2008, Raskin launched the Ubiquity project at Mozilla, which was hailed as the beginning of Web 3.0, and causing such noted blogger as Robert Scoble to abandon IE8 for Firefox.

Raskin is also the creator of Algorithm Ink, a port of the Context Free Art to Javascript. It has had artwork created by such computer luminaries as Ward Cunningham.

Writing

• Never Use A Warning When You Mean Undo
• Death of the Desktop
• Collaboration Made Simple with Bracket Notation
• The Linguistic Command Line
• Contributor to Phishing and Counter-Measures: Understanding the Increasing Problem of Electronic Identity Theft, ISBN 0-471-78245-9

Talks

• Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop (Google Tech Talk by Raskin)

References

1. Wall Street Journal, WSJ
2. Chicago Tribune
3. BusinessWeek
4. Slashdot, Slashdot
5. Column from Communications of the ACM
6. Interview with ACM Ubiquity
7. Interview with Danish National Radio
8. Interview with Tech Radar
9. Interview with Technology Review
10. Interview with Venture Beat
11. Raskin Center for Human Interfaces
12. Humanized Inc.