Paris Buttfield-Addison

Paris wears many hats: author, co-founder of Secret Lab, researcher, mobile product and technical guru.

Paris has degrees in HCI, computer science, medieval and modern history and enjoys designing, producing and building awesome experiences for mobile. Paris also works with Meebo, Inc., one of the fastest growing consumer Internet companies, building awesome mobile experiences for mobile users. Through some miracle of time management, he is also a Graduate Researcher in information management at the University of Tasmania in Australia.

An expert in the mobile space, Paris is the co-author of the books ‘iPhone and iPad Game Development’ and ‘Unity Mobile Game Development’ (coming in 2011) in the popular ‘For Dummies’ series. The books cover game development on mobile platforms such as the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android devices in languages/frameworks such as Objective-C, CocoaTouch, Open GL ES, Unity, C# and JavaScript. They also cover game design techniques, principles and patterns. Paris also recently wrote a guide to gamification in the Swedish Media Evolution pocket guide to gamification.

Paris is co-founder of Secret Lab., leading production and design efforts in the mobile game and app development space. A frequent speaker at conferences, workshops and training sessions, Paris enjoys discussing engineering, product development, design and other facets of the mobile and game development worlds. Recent conferences of note include GDC in San Francisco, Interaction 11 in Boulder, CO (speaking on gamification), XMediaLab Sweden (January 2011), DevWorld 2010 and OZCHI. Topics of note are interaction design, user interface design and mobile product design.

Paris founded and led ithinkitworks P/L from 2001 to 2008, spearheading product development and design efforts on a variety of platforms including desktop Linux, Windows, Mac OS, Palm OS, Windows Mobile/Pocket PC and others.

Paris is also a highly experienced software developer, product and project manager. Key experiences include Objective-C/Cocoa on the Macintosh and iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad platforms, Java on Blackberry and Google Android and C# on Windows Mobile. Open GL ES and Unity are also favourites.

Recent awards have included the 2010 Tasmanian Pearcey Award (a prestigious national Australian award for those who have “taken a risk and made a difference” within the technology industry) and three 2010 Tasmanian ICT Awards (“Export”, “Digital Media” and the “President’s Award for Excellence”).

Presenting at UX Australia 2011:
Gamification sucks: Lessons from the field