Bill Moggridge

He was quoted as saying, "If there is a simple, easy principle that binds everything I have done together, it is my interest in people and their relationship to things."

Bill Moggridge was born in London on June 25, 1943, to Helen (an artist) and Henry Weston Moggridge (a civil servant). Moggridge studied industrial design at the Central School of Art and Design, London, from 1962 to 1965. In 1965 he moved to the US to find opportunities as a designer, and landed his first job as a designer for the American Sterilizer Co. in Erie, Pennsylvania, designing hospital equipment. In 1969, Moggridge returned to London to study typography and communications.

In 1969, Moggridge founded his first company, Moggridge Associates, in the top floor of his home in London. His first industrial design to reach the market was a toaster for Hoover UK in the year 1970. In 1972, he worked on his first computer project, a minicomputer for Computer Technology Ltd, UK, that was never produced. In 1973, another Hoover UK design, for a space heater, was featured on the cover of a UK design magazine.

Moggridge returned to the US in 1979 to open another firm, called ID Two, first located in Palo Alto, California. An early client was GRiD Systems, for whom he designed what is widely regarded as the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass. This was the first portable computer with a display that closed over the keyboard, a patented innovation that GRiD licensed for many years. It retailed at $8,150 (£5,097) and flew on board every Space Shuttle mission from 1983 to 1997. In 1982, designer Mike Nuttall joined ID Two from the London office and worked on another portable computer project, the WorkSlate, for Convergent Technologies. Because of the potential for conflict of interest, Nuttall left ID Two to form his own firm in Palo Alto, Matrix Product Design. In this period, Moggridge also began teaching in Stanford University's Product Design Program, where he met fellow teacher David Kelley, who had his own engineering design firm, David Kelley Design. In 1991, Moggridge became a co-founder of IDEO, with David Kelley and Mike Nuttall, as all four firms merged into one. Moggridge stayed at IDEO until 2010, when he was named an IDEO Fellow.

In March 2010, Moggridge left IDEO to become director of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, the first person to do so without a museum background. Cooper Hewitt is the only museum in the US devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. Moggridge died of cancer in a hospice in San Francisco on 8 September 2012.

From 1983 to 2010, Moggridge was consulting associate professor in different departments at Stanford University, including the Product Design Program, the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization, and the d.school (officially the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design). Moggridge was Congress Chair for CONNECTING'07, the Icsid World Design Congress held in San Francisco, a role that began in 2000 as he led the effort to prepare a bid that was presented at the 2001 Icsid Congress in Seoul, Korea. In 2001, Moggridge became a steering committee member at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy. In 1993, he was a visiting professor in interaction design at Royal College of Art in London and he was a trustee at the Design Museum in London 1992–1995. He had been an advisor to the British government on design education in 1974, and a board member at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.