David Ehlers

To me, technology and design have always been intertwined -- two complementary sides of innovation, constantly pushing each other to see more, do more, be more.The foundation for this view was set with my time at Art Center College of Design, acquiring rigorous training in industrial design, architecture, product design and learning it’s about spending as much time with the machines as it is with my sketches - each alone is a good craft, the two together create breathtaking new frontiers.

I then built on that foundation through first, physical, then later, digital work at Walt Disney Imagineering, Mutation Labs, and Berklee College of Music -- creating new rides, helping TV networks make sense of digital, pioneering online learning for the creative fields.

In 2006, I started my own agency, Not That This, to shift intently into digital work, soaking up emerging technologies and programming languages as quickly as new design approaches -- ultimately helping old school TV giants (ABC, Disney, CNN,) blue chip tech co’s (Netflix, Cisco, Sony) and rough-and-tumble startups make truly breakthrough, even patentable products.

Over time, I realized my process for combining tech and design was not just successful, but unique. I follow a best practice user-centered design process - but get to even more interesting places, faster than others my clients worked with. I streamline Ideation down to a core set of workshops and steps. I iterate like a developer, but find the emotional connection like a designer. I’m as comfortable in GitHub as CreativeSuite. And I partner with true tech geniuses that don’t “cover” the tech work for me, they uncover it with me -- the pair of us pulling and pushing each other through to that next threshold of innovation.