Eric Reiss
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Eric Reiss is the author of Practical Information Architecture (ISBN 0-201-72590-8) and Web Dogma '06. He has emerged as one of the most influential figures on the European information architecture/usability scene today and is a frequent speaker at professional events.
[edit] Biography
Born in San Antonio, Texas in 1954, his family relocated to St. Louis prior to his first birthday when his father accepted a position at Washington University School of Medicine. Reiss is the son of two prominent physicians. His Viennese-born father, Eric Reiss, M.D., performed early and groundbreaking research on parathyroid hormone (PTH). His mother, Louis Zibold Reiss, M.D., was instrumental in reseach studying the levels of Strontium-90 in milk secondary to nuclear fallout. His family moved to the Chicago suburb of Highland Park in 1964. He was active in theatre and the performing arts while at Highland Park High School from 1968-1972. During that period, he became interested in vintage player piano and jukebox repair & restoration.
Reiss returned to St. Louis to study at Washington University in 1972. An accomplished ragtime pianist, Reiss was Musical Director on the Goldenrod Showboat on the Mississippi River levee during much of 1975. In 1976, he graduated with degrees in Performing Arts and Political Science after which he moved to Copenhagen, Denmark to become a stage director at the Danish Royal Theatre. In 1977, his play, Marionettes, was awarded first prize at the Illinois One-Act Play Festival.
Following a successful career in the Scandinavian theater world, publication of the first Danish-language adventure game (Skabet), and a short stint studying Egyptology, Reiss' first book, The Compleat Talking Machine (ISBN 1-886606-18-8) led to a major career change in 1986.
The talking machine book, which is now in its fourth edition (9th printing), demonstrated his ability to explain technical things in everyday language. Reiss has since worked almost exclusively in developing business-to-business communications materials and marketing strategies for an extraordinary range of products and services – from turnkey sugar factories to cyclotrons and particle accelerators.
With the advent of PC-based multimedia in the late 80s and the World Wide Web a few years later, Reiss combined his knowledge of theater, communication, and computers to build useful interactive business tools. In early 1997, he developed a unique on-line communications concept for his employer, Cross-Border Communications. The resulting microsite, Rick's Cafe, was an interactive precursor to a blog and was subsequently voted Macromedia Site of the Week.
Eric Reiss is a member of the Board of Directors and President of the Information Architecture Institute (formerly the Asilomar Institute) and serves as Chair of the European Information Architecture Summit, EuroIA. He is currently Managing Director of FatDUX, one of Northern Europe’s leading user experience consultancies.
Reiss is still active as a performer and musician, working regularly with Vivienne McKee's London Toast Theatre in Copenhagen. He was also a regular on the MTV-produced candid-camera show, Rent Fup, during the season 1998-99. Other acting credits include the Danish film, Miraklet i Valby (1989) and off-screen dubbing for Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark (2000).
Eric Reiss and his wife Dorthe make their home in Copenhagen, Denmark.
