Jennifer Bove – Women of Interaction Design

Jennifer Bove

Written by Erin Malone

Despite having an undergraduate degree in English, Jennifer Bove started her career working in photography—doing photo services and then a photo editor, including photo production and editing for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. In the late stages of the dot-com boom era, she worked as a project manager and then a content strategist for two of the largest agencies of the era, Agency.com and then Scient. In 2001 she began working as a freelance interactive producer, working for clients which included AOL, American Express, Prada and Vibe.

She moved to Italy in 2003 to attend the Ivrea Interaction Design program and received her master’s degree in 2005, the last class issued degrees by the school. For several years after graduation, she worked as an interaction designer and ran user experience teams for some of the largest agencies in the field including Fjord, Schematic, and Huge and then at the end of 2008 she joined Kicker Studio in San Francisco as a Principal with Dan Saffer, Tom Maiorana, Mike Scully, and Jody Medich.

At Kicker she specialized in natural user interfaces and emerging technologies. She held the role of Managing Director, responsible for business development and operations as well as leading client engagements. While at Kicker she co-founded the Device Design Day conference which ran from 2010 through 2012.

Bove has lived in SF and New York, moving back and forth between the two cities depending on who she was working for at the time. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts, in New York, in the MFA Interaction Design faculty and at the California College of the Arts, in San Francisco, in both the graduate and undergraduate interaction design programs.

Jennifer Bove (right) and Raphael Grignani (left) at the IxDA Interaction Awards Ceremony 2012, image taken on February 3, 2012. ©Interaction Design Association (https://flic.kr/p/bsa7iV)

During the time she was at Kicker, she co-chaired the Interaction 10 (2010) conference and later that year, she co-founded, with Raphael Grignani, the Interaction Awards to celebrate global excellence in the discipline of Interaction Design. The awards were founded under the support of then President Janna DeVylder and the advisory board at the time. The first awards were given in 2012.

Bove left Kicker in early 2013, moving on to GE as a Director of Brand Design. Another stint at Fjord back in New York, and then to Capital One as the Head of Design first for Digital Channels and Treasury Management and finally head of the reorganized division, B2B Payments, which includes both the Treasury Management and Commercial Card businesses. In 2021 Bove moved on to become Vice President, UX and Product Design at Salesforce.org.

Jennifer Bove Bibliography