Karl Fast

At Normative, a software design studio in Toronto, Karl works on design problems for a world with infinite information and cheap computation. His focus is on how interacting with information is critical to the way people solve problems, make decisions, develop insights, and construct meaning. As a former professor of User Experience Design at Kent State University, Karl was instrumental in building one of the first online UX graduate programs. He has a PhD in library and information science from the University of Western Ontario, where he studied the cognitive benefits of interacting with visualizations. He has taught graduate courses on such topics as information visualization, information architecture, human-information interaction, and user research. Karl has been writing and speaking about information-rich design problems and the digital future since the late 1990s. He has been an invited speaker at events across North America, as well as in Europe and Australia. He is also a founding member of the Information Architecture Institute. Karl is also coauthor of the Rosenfeld Media book Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding.