Hi, my name is Matthew Owen Manley. Call me Matt. I am a designer based in Chicago.
Even though I'm a designer now, I started in journalism because I wanted to know how to protect a message, to learn how stories work. I moved into design because I wanted to change how stories could end.
I also decided early in life that I would rather collect experiences than try to structure a linear career. Design is a great method for that. Design allows you to understand the larger workings of things by encountering a wide range of people and their problems. The more people you meet, the more you see the commonality in problems. I think that realization is key for great, and very human, problem solving.
I am, before anything else, an observer.
In the 90s I dropped out of the formalized design education world of the Institute of Design to move to San Francisco. It is there where my real design education began.
I was fortunate to serve as Design Lead at the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International in Menlo Park, California when the seeds of Siri were being developed by the AI/NLP team down te hallway from me, long before it was licensed to Apple. I got to work alongside pioneers of personal computing and video gaming as well as authors of HCI design patterns we still use today. The first computer mouse was kept in a glass display case by the elevator on our floor. Heady days.
That was in 2001, and that was also when my love for ubiquitous computing began. I thought the world was going to be a cool sort of dystopia, the kind you would see in old Max Headroom episodes.
Instead we built a boring dystopia, but that just means there is plenty of opportunity to rebuild.
As a designer I have built interfaces that allow people to explore history and culture, make strategic financial decisions, book a flight with ease, customize their automobile, and much more. I have led design teams of up to seventy, and I have also built on my own as a team of one.
I have written and implemented design strategies for many companies in the Fortune 500. I have presented design trends to a crowd of 12,000. I have been interviewed for and written about ambient intelligence and “calm technology” for twenty years. I have taught about design to MBAs at Carnegie Mellon, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and at NYU Stern School of Business.
I also used to sell records to Biz Markie (that's me on the far left, Biz on the far right).
Some of my favorite moments in design, though, come back to my journalistic roots. I have served as a trendspotter for the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, and also led a team that built Trends Reports for Fjord, which is an agency now known as Accenture Song.
In 2026, I am now drawing on all of these experiences, and more, to build my new company, Dialect. We are a decision sciences company that is dedicated to improving data literacy in all of its cultural forms, high and low. I invite you to follow along with us as we come out this year. █