Kevin Brooks (b1958) grew up in South Philadelphia in a family that laughed a lot. Adept at technical and mathematical endeavors, Kevin thought he was destined to be an engineer, until engineering school at a young age taught him that he was not suited for the culture of engineering school. He...
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Kevin Brooks (b1958) grew up in South Philadelphia in a family that laughed a lot. Adept at technical and mathematical endeavors, Kevin thought he was destined to be an engineer, until engineering school at a young age taught him that he was not suited for the culture of engineering school. He and the school came to a mutual parting of the ways. He was then drawn to parallel interests of writing/filmmaking and computer science, earning a bachelors degree in communications from Drexel University and a masters in film production from Stanford. Telling stories in film and structuring computer programs seemed remarkably similar and interrelated to him, even back in the dark ages of the late 1970's, but he was forced to hold them in parallel until the early 1990's when he joined the MIT Media Lab. By the late 1990's while completing his Ph.D., Kevin discovered oral storytelling, the amazing storyteller Brother Blue, and found a receptive audience for his family and personal stories. (See "Kiss of Summer", available at Amazon and CDBaby.com) After years of performing stories, teaching and presenting on storytelling, working in human interface research and user experience, Kevin collaborated with Whitney Quesenbery on the book Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design. He now lives in the Boston area and still tells stories about his family behind their backs.
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