Maggie Hendrie

Dean, Division of Media and Technology

User experience pioneer Maggie Hendrie is the dean of the Division of Media and Technology and former chair of the undergraduate Interaction Design Department at ArtCenter, the first Southern California school to offer such a degree. As chair, she helped organize the Data to Discovery symposium and ongoing program with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology, bringing computer science and design students together with researchers and engineers to develop interactive visualization tools.

Hendrie has more than 20 years of experience in new interactive product/service strategy, digital product design, project management, user-centered design, and usability and user experience testing. In 2004, she founded Sony Pictures Entertainment’s User Experience Competency Center and, as director, was responsible for working with divisions worldwide to integrate usability, information architecture and interaction into Sony devices and cross-platform projects. Prior, she was creative director for user experience at Whittman-Hart/MarchFirst, director of client solutions at Caresoft, strategy director at Manifest Digital and senior user interface designer at CyberMedia. In addition, Hendrie consults for numerous clients, including venture capital investors, Toyota, Kaiser Permanente and Accenture.

She is the principal of Maggie Hendrie Design, a cross-channel business and service solution firm providing mobile and web apps, social media campaigns, and consumer-facing online tools for start up companies and Fortune 500 companies such as Allstate, PepsiCo, Sears, Mattel and Toyota. She was also a senior lecturer at Loyola Marymount University and Otis College of Art and Design.

Hendrie says, “Interaction designers must be prepared not only for multidisciplinary projects and work environments but for a medium that can range from gestural sensor-driven networks to gameplay and wired cities.”

She received her MA in liberal arts from the University of Edinburgh, her MS in communication and information sciences from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University and her DEA in multimedia design and communication from the University of Paris VIII.