Mark Hurst is an entrepreneur and writer concerned with the idea of “good experience” – in particular, what enables or detracts from meaningful experiences of creativity, technology, community, and life.
Every spring in New York he runs the Gel conference, spotlighting heroes and innovators of good experience in a variety of fields. There are many videos online of past Gel talks.
Hurst also writes Good Experience as a blog and email newsletter for tens of thousands of readers.
In 1997 Hurst founded Creative Good, a firm devoted to helping business create better experiences for their customers and employees. He runs it with business partner Phil Terry.
Hurst has also created the annual Uncle Mark product guide; a list of good games online; an online to do list, and several other harebrained labors of love. A couple of years ago Mark’s site “This Is Broken” became popular, but it got to be so much work that now it’s a purely user-generated Flickr group.
His 2007 book Bit Literacy proposed a basic set of skills to overcome information overload. Douglas Rushkoff wrote, “Mark Hurst is the smartest person thinking about ways technology can make our lives easier rather than harder.”
Hurst began his Internet career as a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab, then worked with Seth Godin at Yoyodyne. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from MIT and lives in New York City with his wife and son.
He’s also on Twitter and Facebook.
