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Our Mission
Our Services
Lauralee Alben
Jim Faris
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Lauralee is recognized for bringing human values to the forefront in the fields of design and technology. Among the earliest to consider herself a designer of "experiences" rather than objects, Lauralee has long been an advocate for a humanistic approach to the emerging practice of interactive media. This passion is reflected in her design work, writing and speaking.
In 1997, The Design Management Institute selected Lauralee as the first recipient of the Muriel Cooper Prize for original thinking, future promise and a spirit of exploration. Lauralee was also chosen as one of the I.D. Forty, I.D. Magazine's pick of "the most important design innovators from the West Coast."
Described as having "uncommonly good common sense," Lauralee manages to stay in touch with real user needs while imaginatively solving complex design challenges. She brings broad experience to crafting effective communications across media in coordinated and strategic ways. Her understanding of interactive media is grounded in an extensive background in the traditional worlds of branding, corporate identity, print, architectural graphics and exhibition design. Unpretentious sophistication characterizes her work for a diverse mix of clients.
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Lauralee's articles on design have been published in computer, design and business publications including the Design Management Journal, interactions, New Media and interact, The American Center for Design Journal. While serving as an advisor and juror for the ACM Interactions Awards Committee, Lauralee wrote a landmark article, "Quality of experience: Criteria for interaction design." Her design work has appeared in I.D. Magazine, Communication Arts, HOW, and at SIGGRAPH and CHI.
Currently, Lauralee is a member of the steering committee and a founding member of the AIGA Advance for Design. She is also on the program committee for DIS 2000. Lauralee has served as a juror for interactive competitions sponsored by Communication Arts, New Media, and HOW magazines, where she serves on the editorial board.
Lauralee gives keynote addresses to corporations, such as Procter & Gamble and Adobe, promoting the value design brings to business. She also lectures regularly at professional conferences including IIID's Vision Plus 4, the American Center for Design's Living Surfaces, the HOW Design Conference and the Usability Professionals' Association conference. She has lectured at many schools and universities including Yale, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon and has served as an evaluator for two industry initiatives designed to create alliances between design professionals and students from schools around the world: Apple Computer's Design Project and Interval Research Corporation's University Workshop.
Prior to AlbenFaris, Lauralee served as Senior Designer and Project Director at Siegel & Gale in New York where she was involved with corporate identity programs for General Accident Insurance, The Rockefeller Group, Mellon Bank and TRW. Her international experience includes work for Henrion Design Associates International (now Henrion, Ludlow and Schmidt) in London, where she contributed to identity programs for Coopers & Lybrand, KLM Airlines, French Kier (an English construction firm) and Vorwerk (a German conglomerate).
Trained at Rhode Island School of Design, Lauralee continued her graduate studies in graphic design and film animation at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland.
Concerned with the development of new technologies and their influence on our world, Lauralee is focusing on the role design plays in contributing to our collective conscience, values and ethics. Presently, Lauralee is collecting and telling stories about the ways in which we are designing our own humanity. These design stories will eventually become a book and a series of short films called "Designing Ourselves."
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