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Arnie Lund

Arnie has always enjoyed research and scientific pursuit...he spent most of his childhood trying to build hovercrafts, blow various things up, and create life out of a home-made primordial ooze made out of motor oil and cold cream. Of course, he ended up studying chemistry...and then turned his studies and attention to theoretical chemistry, psychology, religion (as a seminary student), then plumber, ditch-digger, jeweler, and teaching (his own) personality theory. His interest in psychology seems to have stemmed from things he'd heard about what happened between young men and young women on a couch. He landed a job at Bell Labs, where he was paid to do nothing, now he's at Microsoft...oh, for heaven's sakes, read the interview. His history is nuts, he's nuts (in a great, smart, interesting way), and you're in for quite a ride.

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Excerpts From the Interview

The great thing about moving into the field I've moved into is that being interested in too many things is a virtue.

At the time, what I was interested in is: How does this work, and what goes on in peoples' heads as they read and use the information to do things? Thinking through it, are you going into the process with some kind of model in your head of what the solution is going to look like, and you're filling in the solution as you read? Do you go into the process looking for certain clues about how the information is structured? What information are you looking for? How do you put that information together in order to create solutions to problems? I was a kid.

More About Arnie Lund

Arnold (Arnie) Lund is Director of User Experience and User Experience Community Lead for Microsoft's IT organization. He also serves on Microsoft's User Experience Leadership Team. Before moving to IT, he served as the Director of User Experience for the Mobile and Tablet Computing area and helped to ship the recent Vista operating system. Arnie has spent more than 20 years working in the area of user experience and emerging technologies. He began his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories managing both human factors and systems engineering teams. He then moved to one of the companies that emerged from AT&T to help Ameritech build its own Science and Technology organization, where he managed user experience as well as new product ideation. From there he led exploratory software development and user experience teams at US West Advanced Technologies, and information architecture and emerging technology research at Sapient (a leading internet consultancy).