How do you go from a backyard scientist with no formal training to the world authority on antibiotic resistant disease within a week? How can spam emails subtly shift the course of world politics? How can you tell the difference between a well established fact, and a factoid repeated across multiple formats in a deliberate attempt to create false consensus?

In this talk Matthew Borgatti will take you through the strange world of manipulating public opinion and individual behavior through campaigns of misinformation. We'll touch on how rumors are fabricated, how tantalizing facts remain in the public consciousness even long after they've been proven false, and the disturbingly effective manipulations that are possible with the mountains of data that can be gleaned from social networking sites.

Matthew Borgatti

Matthew Borgatti is a multidisciplinary designer, having played with everything from SFX animatronics for films like Snakes on a Plane and Aliens VS Predator, to rapid prototyping, animation and industrial design. He runs a small prototyping lab in Brooklyn and owns the design house Sleek and Destroy.

He's responsible for the design behind Hackerspace Passports, the Guy Fawkes Bandanas, and a giant interactive sculpture made from recycled pipe organ parts called the Anywhere Organ. His focus is on how people interact with systems (whether those systems culminate in an object, a piece of technology, an interface, or a process). Since so much of designing good UX is understanding perceptions and the ways people assimilate information, Matthew has made a substantial study of cognitive bias and how format, design, and tone can affect a person's reality.