Design Thinking Senior Lecturer, MIT
Leader of the Advanced Concept Lab at Sonos

Blade is the user-experience expert and, in addition to providing consulting service in Design-Thinking (www.bladekotelly.com), he is the Leader of the Advanced Concept Lab at Sonos where he defines the future experience that will fill your home with music.

Prior to joining Sonos, Blade was the VP of Design & Consumer Experience at Jibo, Inc. where he was in charge of the industrial design, human factors, user interface, brand, packaging and, web experience supporting Jibo, the world’s first social robot for the home. Blade has also designed a variety of technologies including ones at Rapid7, an enterprise security-software company; StorytellingMachines, a software firm enabling anyone to make high-impact movies; Endeca Technologies, a search and information access software technology company; and Edify and SpeechWorks, companies that provided speech-recognition solutions to the Fortune 1000.

Blade wrote the book on speech-recognition interface design; The Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice (Addison Wesley Professional, 2003), and his work and thoughts have been featured in publications including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and on media including TechTV, NPR, and the BBC.

Since 2003, Blade has taught courses on design thinking. He’s a frequent guest lecturer at Stanford University and Harvard University and holds a Bachelors of Science in Human-Factors Engineering from Tufts University and a Master of Science in Engineering and Management from MIT.