Techable Talks: Making the Connected Home a Reality

Angus Montgomery (Design Week) in conversation with Kassir Hussain (Connected Homes at British Gas) and Matt Cottam (Tellart).

Matt Cottam, Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder of Tellart

Since co-founding the international design studio Tellart in 1999, Matt has directed projects and strategy for clients such as Google, Samsung, YouTube, Target, Science Museum (London), Nokia Design, Humana, Philips and Otis Elevator–many of which have won prestigious design awards including Cannes Lions, SXSW, D&AD, IxDA, Lovie, and Core77. He is an internationally recognized speaker at venues such as LIFT, IxDA, Google Tech Talks, Quantified Self, Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, Berlin Design Festival, d.school at Stanford University, Emerging Technologies (ETech, O’Reilly), Future Technologies Research Summit at Intel, PICNIC, SIGCHI, IDSA/ICSID, DEFCON, Designing User Experience (DUX) and many more.

Matt holds both Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Industrial Design degrees from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD, USA), as well as a Masters of Fine Arts in Interaction Design from Umeå University (UID, Sweden). In addition to his design education and practice, Matt is an Advanced Life Support Paramedic and serves on the United States’ federal disaster medical team and National Ski Patrol.

For ten years, Matt taught studio courses at RISD on topics ranging from design for extreme environments to physical computing. From 2005 to 2012 Matt taught at Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University (UID, Sweden) where he held the position of Adjunct Professor. He has also taught at Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO, Norway) and The Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA, China). Matt is currently a member of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design Faculty (CIID, Denmark) where he has been teaching courses including Intro to IxD (with Bill Verplank), Experimental Imaging (with Timo Arnall), and Information Design since the school’s pilot year.

Kassir Hussain, Director of Hive and Connected Homes at British Gas

Kassir joined British Gas in 2012 having previously worked at Sky and Telefonica in software development and innovation. It’s no surprise that Kassir spends his weekend’s geeking over the latest tech. He loves photography and had he not gone into tech, he may well have been a photojournalist.

Tent London hosts #TechableTalks at Second Home, a series of talks to promote the city's creativity during London Design Festival. Drawing on the country's greatest thinkers, practitioners and retailers, the talks, sponsored by Hive, will be an unmissable celebration of tech-enabled design.