Chris Rockwell

Founder & CEO | lextant Chris is the founder of lextant, a user experience consultancy dedicated to informing and inspiring design through a deep understanding of people, their experiences and their aspirations. lextant’s experienced team of design research and user-experience professionals have provided this clarity for design innovation in such diverse domains as consumer package goods, health care systems, durable goods, retail apparel, consumer electronics, and information technology systems. Chris grew up with a passion to understand how the things we “make” affect how we work, live, and play. At the early age of 16, he was conducting research programs to explore technology design and driver behavior for pay-at-the-pump systems, steering controls, and entertainment systems. After completing his Masters in Human Factors Engineering at Virginia Tech., Chris joined Hewlett-Packard where he spent 6 years developing and honing user-centered design methodologies. With a vision for design research at the heart of innovation, Chris formed lextant and led the development of immersive research methods and translation strategies to identify and clarify opportunities for product, retail, brand and interactive design programs. His contextual, ethnographic, participatory, and modeling frameworks have helped clients such as Microsoft, P&G, Motorola, Whirlpool, American Eagle, Cardinal Health, Johnson & Johnson and others deliver products and solutions aligned with the emotional, behavioral, and experiential needs of their customers. A frequent speaker and thought leader, Chris was recently named adjunct faculty at The Ohio State University. He also sits on the Advisory Board for Virginia Tech’s Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Activities for Chris

Speaker | Medical Design Deep Dive | 2018

Empathic by Design: Care in the Age of Patient Experience

We are in the age of the empowered patient. Evolving healthcare organizations are rapidly shifting from volume of procedures to quality of experience to deliver better patient-centered care. But patients’ care journeys today are fragmented—punctuated by ambiguity and unpredictability. The responsibility for managing this complexity often is pushed to patients and caregivers, leading to frustration and anxiety. Chris Rockwell of Lextant will explore the empathic care model and the attributes that define care-driven services. Empathic care is an ideal service framework used to guide healthcare systems design and evaluate patient experiences; it’s a model that adds calmness and clarity to the life, health and longevity to the patient. Rockwell will dive into the ten principles for empathic care and demonstrate how attendees immediately can design processes, technologies and environments for an improved care journey, and why this is crucial for the future of the industry.


IDSA Medical Conference 2018 chair Bryce Rutter discusses speaker Chris Rockwell.