Roger Ibars is an Interaction Designer working in Product Innovation. He specializes in Natural User Interfaces, from the social and technical explorations to defining the syntactics and semantics on early prototyping. His research interest include Social Sciences, Human Computer Interaction and Critical Design.
Roger worked initially to investigate the intersection between healthcare and future technologies at MIT Medialab Europe in Dublin back in 2003 and later at RCA ID Research Lab with the U.K. National Health Service in London.
With the aim to explore game controllers and gesture interaction, in 2002 he started to build "Hard-wired devices" to create debate about the influence of gaming culture on the design of user interfaces. The result was a collection of vintage electronic devices -alarm clocks and game controllers- in which two cultures of interface blend between the computer gaming culture and the home appliance culture. The Hard-wired devices been exhibited London (RCA), Dublin (Digital Hub), Lisbon (Design Biennale), Copenhagen (Next05), Amsterdam (Open Source Congress), Barcelona (H2O gallery, solo exhibition), Tokyo (DesignTide), Madrid (Emotional design) and in Paris (Centre Pompidou) in Peru (Telefonica Fundation), in Korea (MOA), in Barcelona (DHub) and in Autin, Texas (CHI conference 2012). His work has been featured in design and art publications such as Axis Magazine in Japan, Art Investor in Germany, Make Magazine and Interactions Magazine in the USA.
He has since taken his expertise in exploring gesture interactions to Tokyo for Sony Concept Lab, Berlin for Deutsche Telekom and Beijing for Microsoft Research Asia at the HCI group. The joystick has literally carried him around the world and back. He has also been active in teaching Interaction Design and organising workshops at leading design universities in Paris (ENSAD), London (RCA), Lausanne (ECAL), New Delhi (IIT), Tokyo (MUSABI) and Kyoto (UltraLab).
Roger Ibars studied Sociology at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (1995) and graduated from Industrial Design (BA) at Escola Superior de Disseny ESDI (1999). He holds a Masters in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art in London.
Currently Roger lives in Seattle and works as a Senior Interaction Designer at Microsoft Design Group. At Microsoft, he has designed and built working prototypes to demonstrate new interaction models for products such as Kinect for Windows, Xbox One, Surface Hub, Cortana voice agent, Windows Hello, HoloLens and Windows Holographic.