Nicole Yankelovich is the Founder and Principal of Envisiture, a consulting practice specializing in helping clients conceive, visualize, design, and build future products and services. Nicole has extensive experience envisioning effective future solutions. Having started and managed four research programs at Sun Microsystems over her almost 20 year tenure with the company as well as having founded her own company, Nicole is an expert at taking a germ of an idea for a product or service and guiding a team through the process of turning that idea into a reality. That process may include field research to better understand potential customer pain points, stakeholder interviews, brainstorming sessions, guided design exercises, storyboard creation, prototyping, and idea validation with potential customers.

In addition to running the Envisiture consulting practice, Nicole is the Executive Director of the non-profit Open Wonderland Foundation and she holds a Visiting Scientist position at the MIT Center for Educational Computing Initiatives.  In 2010 she founded WonderBuilders, a company that created 3D virtual environments for education and training. While at Sun Labs between 1991 and 2010, Nicole directed projects including Porta-Person, a telepresence device; the Sun Labs Meeting Suite, a suite of tools to augment audio conferences; Awarenex, an instant messaging client with advanced presence features; SharedShell, a multi-user terminal program that works across firewalls; and SpeechActs, an early telephone-based natural-language speech application. Prior to joining Sun in 1991, Nicole worked on hypertext research at Brown University, helping to pioneer some of the now-familiar concepts embodied in the World Wide Web. Nicole holds seven patents related to interaction design and has published numerous articles and book chapters on virtual worlds, collaborative environments, speech applications, and hypertext. She has served on the organizing and program committees of international conferences such as CHI, CSCW, UIST, ASSETS, and Hypertext, and she is a long-time steering committee member of BostonCHI, the Boston chapter of the ACM’s special interest group on computer-human interaction.

For project descriptions and demo videos, see Nicole’s Portfolio.