Erin Drake Kajioka keynote speaker

Erin Drake Kajioka is a game designer, author, and speaker currently working as Head of Applied Game Design for Google Research. From 2017-2020 she led Google Stadia's research and development lab. Prior to Google she was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, following a 17 year career as a game systems designer for companies including Konami, DreamWorks, Zynga, GlassLab, and Simutronics. She co-founded the social good game company Sense of Wonder and is the published author of three novels, many short stories, game industry nonfiction, and one infamous blog essay.

Erin is a communicator, a design leader, a futurist, a nerd-lover, a parent, and a believer in a future where technology -- in concert with well designed social systems -- enables all human beings to achieve self-actualization. She likes to go where the learning is. She focuses on gameplay innovation & using interactive media to empower people.

Her specialties are: innovation; games and machine learning/AI; vision-setting, pitching & communication; systems thinking; designing for emotion; building and facilitating teams to do great innovation work (and form forever bonds in the process); designing complex systems (and elegantly simple ones).