Marc Rigley, Playground Director, Fuel Industries

Mark is a seasoned leader of product teams, with experience in consumer electronics, automotive, and product design.  His work has won international awards, including Best in Show in Automotive at CES 2012. He is a frequent presenter at technical and design conferences in Europe and North America, including a recent appearance at TEDx Kanata.

He is fascinated both by emerging technologies and by the design challenges that these new technologies pose. His role as Playground Director at Fuel Industries in Ottawa gives him plenty of opportunity to stay ahead of the curve technologically, while staying grounded in human-centred design principles.

What are you presenting:

“I will be presenting a talk on brand engagement and marketing in the age of makers. Working title: “Marketing in the Age of Makers” – how agencies and brands are joining the maker revolution.” 

Vision of the future:

“As far as my vision of the future goes, I believe that we are entering what could be a golden age of product design, powered in part by the rise of maker culture. The increasingly fast pace of commoditization of technology has given us, as designers, an amazingly rich set of tools with which to work.  So many technical problems have been solved; all of these roads, so to speak, have been paved. Instead of struggling with engineering hardware and software, we are now free to focus on design, on the invention and creation of meaningful products and services.”