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Surya Vanka

Principal Manager

Picture of Surya Vanka. Copyright unknown.
Personal Homepage:
microsoft.com/design/People/Detail.aspx?key=surya


Current place of employment:
Microsoft Corporation

Manager of User Experience Excellence, Microsoft Corporatioon A 9-year veteran of Microsoft, Surya Vanka is Senior Manager of User Experience Excellence, and oversees best practices and engineering standards to create high-quality user experiences for Microsoft’s customers. Uesr experience innovation happens daily at Microsoft. But with more than 300 enginnering teams and 600 user experience professionals spread across the world in groups from 2 to 40, it's up to Surya and his team to capture the best of these innovations and make them widely available. Surya's mission is put the users rather than technology at the center of the development process for all of Microsoft's products. Surya was professor of design at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was a Fellow at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study. He is the author of two books on design, has lectured on design in over 20 countries, and published widely. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Form, ID Magazine, WIRED, Interactions, BBC Radio, National Public Radio, and Channel 15 Television. He is the recipient of several awards including best practice awards at Microsoft, an accessibility achievement award, Sloan Foundation Award and an IDSA best paper award.

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Publications by Surya Vanka (bibliography)

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1995
 
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Vanka, Surya and Klein, David (1995): ColorTool: An Information Tool for Cross-Cultural Design. In: Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 39th Annual Meeting 1995. pp. 341-345.

Color meanings vary dramatically across cultures. Sometimes globally marketed products fail, either commercially or in use, because designers were unaware of culture specific meanings associated with the colors they selected. Designers generally tend to base color decisions on aesthetic reasons, and on anecdotal knowledge of cultures. This is primarily because of the lack of truly useful information tools that can assist them in making informed cross cultural color choices. ColorTool is a computer based tool that designers can use to learn about culture-specific color dialects, to search for colors associated with specified meanings, or to check the cultural appropriateness of aesthetic color choices. This paper describes the development, use, and evaluation of ColorTool. Further, it discusses the potential for network tools that could involve cultural experts and even users in the color selection process.

© All rights reserved Vanka and Klein and/or Human Factors Society

1990
 
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Vanka, Surya (1990). A Methodology for Cross-cultural Semantic Design. Ohio State University

 
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May 19

Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.

-- Paul Rand, 1997

 
 

Featured chapter

Read the fascinating history of Wearable Computing, told by its father, Steve Mann

Read Steve's chapter !

 
 

Help us help you!