Hospitality & Design Summit 2009 - 5

Shawn Ford Shawn Ford has more than 14 years of experience in the hospitality industry, as a director of operations for a hotel management company, and now as a vice president at Lodging Econometrics, the global authority for hotel real estate. LE tracks new hotel construction, reﬂaggings, major renovations, condo hotels, hotels with private residences, timeshare and vacation clubs, and serviced apartments around the world. LE maintains a comprehensive individual “sales lead” record for each project. LE’s Forecast for New Construction through 2010 and beyond reveals growth areas in global lodging development—by geography and sector. Christopher Sanderson Christopher Sanderson is creative director of Viewpoint, the international trend forecasting magazine. As cofounder of The Future Laboratory, London, he is responsible for delivering consumer insight, trend forecasting, and brand strategy to a client list that includes American Express, The New Yorker, Veuve Clicquot, the Gap, Nokia, British Vogue and Procter & Gamble. Recent personal projects include directing Futurescape, a series of short films about the future for Channel Four television. He has a monthly column in U.K. luxury industry bible, The Luxury Brieﬁng, and previously was contributing style editor at British Esquire. He has also worked as a freelance creative director on strategic planning for fashion brands. Established in November 2001, The Future Laboratory is recognized internationally for its innovative approach to trend forecasting, consumer insight, and brand strategy. Via a 3,000-person-strong global LifeSigns Network and in-house team of trend analysts and ethnographic researchers, The Future Laboratory provides qualitative and quantitative insights into future consumers and how to target them. Clients in the retail, technology, ﬁnance, automotive, food, fashion, and creative industries sectors rely on daily, weekly, and quarterly news feeds, insight reports, analyses, strategy documents, and brand personality audits to keep their brand on track, and their marketing, strategy, and research teams informed and insightful. Prior to founding The Future Laboratory, he worked as a UK communications director for surfwear brand Quiksilver, and as lecturer in visual communication at The London Institute. He is a regular speaker and consultant for The British Council, where projects include setting up magazines in India and Estonia, and overviewing the growth of the creative industries in Scandinavia. In 2004, he was appointed to the British Council Creative Industries advisory panel. James Howard Kunstler James Howard Kunstler says he wrote The Geography of Nowhere (Touchstone,1993), “Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work.” Home From Nowhere (Touchstone, 1996) was a continuation of that discussion with an emphasis on the remedies. A portion of it appeared as the cover story in the September 1996 issue of Atlantic Monthly. His next book in the series, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition (Simon & Schuster / Free Press, 2001), is a wide-ranging look at cities here and abroad, an inquiry into what makes them great (or miserable), and in particular what America is going to do with its mutilated cities. His latest book, The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), is about the challenges posed by the coming permanent global oil crisis, climate change, and other “converging catastrophes of the 21st Century.” The Atlantic Monthly Press also published his novel, Maggie Darling, in 2004. Kunstler is the author of eight other novels including The Halloween Ball, An Embarrassment of Riches. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine and op-ed page, where he has written on environmental and economic issues. Born in New York City in 1948, he moved to the Long Island suburbs in 1954 and returned to the city in 1957 where he spent most of his childhood. He graduated from the State University of New York, Brockport campus, worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and ﬁnally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. He has no formal training in architecture or the related design ﬁelds. He has lectured at Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Virginia, and many other colleges. He has appeared before professional organizations including the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the American Planning Association (APA), and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He lives in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. Jill Bolte Taylor Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist. Her specialty was in the postmortem investigation of the human brain as it relates to schizophrenia and the severe mental illnesses. Because she has a brother who has been diagnosed with the brain disorder schizophrenia, Taylor served for three years on the board of directors of the NAMI organization (National Alliance on Mental Illness) between 1994-1997. Currently she serves as president of the Greater Bloomington Afﬁliate of NAMI in Bloomington, Indiana. Because there is a long term shortage of brain tissue donated for postmortem research by individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, Taylor travels as the National Spokesperson for the Mentally Ill for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center (Harvard Brain Bank) located at McLean Hospital. As the “Singin’ Scientist,” Taylor delivers this very popular keynote address titled “How To Get Your Brain To Do What You Want It To Do.” In addition, she is the Consulting Neuroanatomist for the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute (MPRI), which uses protons (rather than photons) to battle cancer. But as irony would have it, on December 10, 1996, Taylor woke up to discover that she was experiencing a rare form of stroke, an arteriovenous malformation (AVM). Two and a half weeks later, on December 27, 1996, she underwent major brain surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital to remove a golf ball-size blood clot that was placing pressure on the language centers in the left hemisphere of her brain. It took eight years for Taylor to rebuild her brain successfully—from the inside out. In response to the swelling and trauma of the stroke, which placed pressure on her dominant left hemisphere, the functions of her right hemisphere blossomed. Among other things, she now creates and sells unique stained glass brains when commissioned to do so. In addition, she published a book about her recovery from stroke and the insights she gained into the workings of her brain. The New York Times bestselling memoir is titled My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey (Penguin Group, 2006). In May of 2008, Time magazine chose Taylor as one of the “100 Most Inﬂuential People in the World” and she was the premiere guest on Oprah’s Soul Series webcast. In addition, her interview with Oprah and Dr. Mehmet Oz on the Oprah Winfrey Show aired on October 21, 2008. h o s p i t a l i t y d es ign s ummit 2 0 0 9

Hospitality & Design Summit 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Hospitality & Design Summit 2009