Meet the Jury

As the Executive Director Design at DBS Bank, I apply design practices and behavioural science to transform and inform optimised customer experiences. With over 20 years experience in the financial and insurance sectors, I have a proven track record of delivering strategic change, impact, and growth through customer-centric solutions and innovation.

My core competencies include creative ideation, user research, Figma software, futures and scenarios planning, and leadership and management. I am passionate about developing future practice, where design intersects with strategy and customer experience, particularly in sustainable design. I lead a multi-disciplinary team across innovation, behavioural science, product, futures strategy, and customer experience design, working on challenges ranging from improving insurance products and services to addressing the emerging risks posed by climate change and new forms of mobility.

Boon Yew Chew is a principal UX designer, IxDA London local leader and former IxDA board member. He designs for enterprise products and services, with work spanning over 20 years across various industries including publishing, finance, automotive, healthcare, telecoms and retail. His passion lies in helping organisations deliver products and services that put people at the heart of the work, informed by his broad interests in services, systems, complexity, futures, and organisational change. Boon holds an MSc in Human-Computer Interaction from University College London and BSc in computer engineering from the University of Kansas.

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Tin is a Senior Product Design Manager at Instagram, where he leads the design systems team that creates and maintains the visual language and components of one of the world's most popular social media platforms. He has over 22 years of experience in designing digital products and services, with a strong background in human-computer interaction (HCI).

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As a faculty member at the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), Tin shares his knowledge and insights on HCI with aspiring and established designers. He is also passionate about empowering and mentoring other designers, both within and outside his organization. He is a mentor at adplist.org, a global platform that connects design mentors and mentees, and an investor at Character, a venture studio that helps startups build impactful brands.

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Dongkyu is a digital product designer passionate about turning ideas into intuitive and engaging experiences for people. He is dedicated to the craft, paying close attention to every detail in his design process. With a deep knowledge of prototyping, interaction design, and user experience, Dongkyu aims to create digital products and services that are not only beautiful and functional, but also memorable.

Recently, to further share his knowledge in prototyping and interaction design, Dongkyu authored the article “Transition animations: A practical guide”. He guides readers through creating better transition animations in the product design process, highlighting the significance of choosing the right transitions and the critical role of properly executed transitions at every stage of the user’s journey.

Currently, Dongkyu is part of the design team at Work & Co, a company at the intersection of design and technology. There, he is involved in the creation of a wide range of human-centered digital products and services, focusing on delivering a better product experience for people.

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Zhiqi Lin is the Senior Principal Product Designer at Ingram Micro, where her efforts are central to making technology accessible to nearly 90% of the global population. She leads the design of recommendation across the platforms, transforming traditional supply chain industry into innovative, digital experiences tailored for today’s user needs.

Throughout her career, Zhiqi has worn different hats, ranging from software engineering to accessibility specialization, equipping her with a broad perspective and a deep understanding of creating user-centric technology. Her ability to blend these experiences allows her to tackle complex design challenges effectively, enhancing user engagement and satisfaction.

Zhiqi’s contributions to the design field have been recognized with three MUSE Design Awards. Furthermore, her expertise and insight have led her to judge at other international competitions like the Communicator Award. Beyond her professional achievements, she is dedicated to mentoring upcoming designers,  committed to sharing her knowledge and experiences to inspire new talents.

When she’s not busy designing, Zhiqi likes to travel and taste her way through different cultures and their cuisines.

Xiaobi (Iris) Pan is a globally-recognized pioneer in the fields of User Experience Design, Emerging Technology Design, Integrative Product Design, etc. She has been the inventor of the very first sound wave interactive installation visited by over 1 million participants, the app that promises to plant 100 million trees on our planet by 2025, and a series of industry-leading new technology products and experiences.

Currently a Lead Designer at Amazon, she is dedicated to using technologies like Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence to revolutionize the consumer experience for both business and social good.

Outside of work, she is an avid design blogger with over 220k followers on Zhihu. Her writings on design, technology and their social implications have influenced over 10 million readers worldwide. She is also the co-founder of social-impact driven design studio HMW(How Might We) Design Studio, and new media tech company SeeLove Technology.

Cynthia leads UX at Shopify and is also the author of Tragic Design. Passionate about human beings and their means of communication, Cynthia has always sought a deeper understanding of how people think, interact, and connect.

Communication has thus been a key ingredient in her technological endeavors. A Université de Montréal graduate in industrial design, she was awarded the 2010 RAÉDIUM prize for Chouette!, a technological communication platform to strengthen intergenerational relations. Her slick solution allows preschool kids and seniors to share the same interface, using the poetry of light and play.

Since she joined Shopify, she sprinkled her creativity in many important projects, notably working on web and mobile interfaces. Cynthia excels particularly in a field that is not always fully understood: she creates smart, emotional connections between companies and users. She works as a project lead and user experience (UX) designer. She has a knack for strategic design, ergonomics, and problem-solving. Her wide range of experiences brought her broad recognition as a leading expert on multi-platform interface design.

On top of her daytime job, Cynthia mentors startups and is regularly invited to speak at events around the world, where her playful approach both startles and charms. In her conferences, she shares her passion and her point of view: user-centered design is a reality, not a utopian methodology.

Agustian is a co-founder & partner at Sixty Two, an independent design and strategy studio based in South East Asia.

He holds a degree in Management & Organizational studies from Simon Fraser University and Human Resources Management from Kwantlen University.

With a deep curiosity for innovation & technology, Agustian ventured into design and multimedia development early in his career. He has worked with leading private companies, non-governmental organizations, and government institutions in Canada & South East Asia, such as The World Bank, World Resources Institute, Indonesia Ministry of the State Secretariat, Grab, the University of British Columbia & Best Buy Canada, to name a few.

Agustian now focuses on leading Sixty Two in crafting positive and impactful experiences in South East Asia and the betterment of its community through Project Lima. Together with his partners, he is committed to increasing credibility and recognition for the region.

Carine Lallemand is Assistant Professor in Experience Design at the University of Luxembourg and the Industrial Design Department at the Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands). She has a background in Psychology and Human Computer-Interaction. Her research activities are mainly focused on experience design and evaluation methods, as well as designerly ways to trigger behaviour change. Relying on aesthetics of interaction principles and the use of data as creative material, Carine mentors students to design innovative interactive artefacts. She is the author of a textbook on UX methods, currently used in more than 100 curriculums in 6 French-speaking countries. She is also a passionate advocate for academia-industry relationships

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Carien is Digital Product Design Lead at Neurozone ® , an organization on a mission to see human beings build their collective resilience and reach their greatest potential. She works with experienced neuroscientists who have developed a dynamic, analytical model of resilience based on real-world data, neurology, and the latest in neuroscientific research. It allows them to assess individuals and teams and reveal which aspects of their lives they might pay attention to, to see the greatest impact on their resilience. Carien strives to make this user journey as engaging as possible.

Having spent many years as a UX Designer, Researcher, and CX Consultant in several industries and contexts, including antenna design (Carien’s roots are in Electronic and Microwave Engineering), marketing, banking and investment, e-commerce, healthcare, back-office enterprise software, and mining, she has had the opportunity to work with talented product professionals and to experiment with a number of different product design methods – from JTBD to Design Thinking, to Human-Centred Design. She feels privileged to have spent many, many hours observing diverse people interacting with a variety of digital products.

Recently, she has become concerned about the harm – present and potential future, intended and unintended – being done by technology. She wants to see kindness prioritised in product design: not only towards end-users and their communities but also within the product design community. She is a mother of two small children and sees the potential of digital to shape a kinder, stronger, more resourceful generation.

Twitter | Linkedin

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Sami is a design leader working at the intersection of systems, foresight, and design. What he does daily is help teams, products, and companies to become more resilient by making the right choices about their futures and business, and build teams, capabilities, and organizations to support this in quest long term. Over 20 years in the industry, he’s worked on several continents, earning international patents, numerous awards, and built exits for the largest companies in the world. He’s organized and spoken at numerous industry events ranging from co-chairing Interaction 16 in Helsinki to local meet-ups (IxDA Helsinki) to being invited to speak at Google in San Francisco. Currently, he is one of the founders and the creative director at Nordkapp, a strategic design and innovation consultancy based in Helsinki and Amsterdam, and working globally. He is also an exhibited artist exploring the human potential in generative networks and machine learning.

Dali is Head of UX for Google Trust and Safety, where she leads a global and cross-disciplinary team to craft end-to-end experiences that promote digital safety.

She brings deep expertise of user-centric design by conducting research across 10+ countries, creating impactful foundational design programs, and being an educator, in particular supporting the growth of UX in Latin America.

She has collaborated and partnered with companies such as TomTom, Boeing, Toyota, Ford, and Intel to design experiences for a wide range of products including airplanes, autonomous vehicles, VR, and phones.

Dali holds a doctoral degree in user-system interaction from the Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and a master’s degree in human factors and systems from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, USA.

Buzz is a product designer and design coach, currently Principal Designer at Buildkite, a remote-first software company. Previously he’s led teams at Help Scout, Atlassian, Campaign Monitor, Skype and a handful of design agencies, including his own startup.

Originally from the UK, Buzz was a competitive sailor before turning to design — and today lives by the coast in rural NSW with his lovely wife and two young boys.

Gabriel is the founder and principal consultant at Small Surfaces, an international human-centred design consultancy focused on social impact projects in developing countries. Gabriel works on projects that seek to improve education, healthcare and access to financial services for low-income people across Africa, Asia and the Pacific. He also has a degree in Philosophy.

Dean is a Design Executive from Cape Town, South Africa. He’s spent his career working hard to connect experiences in the physical, digital, and career spaces and finds great value in leaving things more human than he found them.Currently the Founder of Designing Humans, an organization dedicated to professionalizing & strengthening design in Africa, he spends his time mentoring individuals, assisting enterprise design executives demonstrating the value of design, managing design practice at scale, raising design literacy, and developing sustainable talent pipelines.Previously, Dean has worked in startups and tech businesses as a Product Designer, been an executive design director for a multi-national bank, and a digital communications specialist.Outside of work, Dean spends his time with Design communities in South Africa creating the platform for designers to share, learn and improve through the practice of being human.He is also an avid Chilli breeder.

Jay Dutta, abbreviated to JD, is an Indian Design leader. In the last decade, he has built and scaled design teams, and capabilities, for Adobe India, Flipkart, MakeMyTrip and now Udaan. He has advised multiple startups and unicorns as a Designer-in-Residence at the VC – SAIF Partners. In the journey, redefining the role and influence of Design in Indian Tech and Business. He is the founder of DesignUp Conference, arguably SE Asia’s largest and amongst it’s most influential Design-In-Tech Festival – listed by quartz.com as one of “the world’s most exciting Design Events”After graduating from the National Institute of Design in India, JD spent over a decade in Europe, in the formative years of the interaction design discipline. After the dot com boom and bust, he went on do a MSc in Design Management and co-founded his Design Consultancy in Manchester. Jay has shared his journey, insights and learning at TEDx, Adobe Max, Collision and multiple conferences across India, Asia and the US.

Sarah Fathallah (they/she) is an independent designer, researcher, and educator, who specializes in applying participatory research and design to the social sector, and cares about shifting how we engage communities and center lived experience in less extractive, harmful, and paternalistic ways. They have worked on engagements on various topics ranging from reproductive health to labor organizing, with impact-driven organizations such as the International Domestic Workers Federation and Open Society Foundations. In addition to their freelance practice, they serve as Senior Director of Research at Think Of Us and as faculty at the UC Berkeley Extension School and the Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design.

Erico Fileno is a designer and professor with more than 25 years of experience. He combines business, technology and cultural practices, bringing collaborative & human-centered innovation to organizations and services/products to the society, thus impacting the life of millions of people every day around the world.In the early 2000’s, he was the pioneer for igniting Service Design, UX and Interaction Design movements in Latin America. He created the first reference center on Interaction Design and UX in Brazil and the first graduate program in Service Design in the region. He was an important volunteer in IxDA Community, creating Interaction Latin America (2009) and serving the community as local leader, lecturer and – until last year – as Regional Coordinator for Latin America.Nowadays, he is Executive Director at EY (Latin America South Design Studio) – part of a global organization with more than 1,400 designers working in business transformation for Fortune 500 companies.

Shikoh is the CEO of Qhala, a Digital Innovation company that catalyzes digital transformation capabilities for  organizations across Africa. She has over 10 years of experience in the Research, Design, Implementation, and  Management of Digital Technologies. She has established expertise in both African and Emerging Markets  specialized in solving problems in Agriculture, Education, Health, Payments, Retail and Renewable energies.

She is responsible for the set-up of Safaricom Alpha, a first of the kind corporate innovation hub in Africa. Where  she worked as the Head of Products – Innovation and acted as the Chief Innovation Officer. Shikoh also led  Safaricom’s foray into becoming a digital company, by putting together a strategy, and cross-functional teams to  execute the strategy.

Previously worked with Africa Development Bank (AfDB), where she was leading and advising governments across  Africa to adopt ICT for service delivery, she developed the Digital Government Blueprint {put links}, a strategic  document to guide governments in digital transformation, now adopted by Smart Africa. She has also worked with  Google and Microsoft in their emerging markets teams. She has received numerous awards in recognition of her  efforts in influencing Business and Government as well as Technology.

Shikoh seats on various boards in ICT companies and contributes to a number of steering committees and think  tanks on Africa and technology. Shikoh holds a PhD and MSc in Computer Science from the University of Cape Town,  South Africa.

Recently, she was appointed to the COVID-19 ICT Advisory Committee set up by Joe Mucheru, Cabinet Secretary  for ICT, Innovation and Youth Affairs to facilitate containment of the spread of coronavirus in the country using  information communication and technology. She also is part of the COVID-19 Modelling team, informing the  Government of Kenya’s policy formulation using Data.

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Xiangyang Xin, PhD, founder of XXY Innovation, Professor at Tongji University. Xin holds a PhD in Design from Carnegie Mellon University with interests in interaction, experience, service, and organization design, and looks at how design contributes to transformations of lifestyles, businesses and cultures. He had founded MDes Interaction Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and served as former Dean of Design at Jiangnan University and acted as a guest professor in both design and business schools at several universities.

Apart from his educational experiences, Xin has worked on projects with various public and private partners internationally, and served as the president or a board member of professional organizations, including Alliances of Technology and Organization Transformation, Beijing Dragon Design Foundation, China Service Design Conference, China Industrial Design Association; served as a jury member for competitions including IXDA, G-Mark, Red Star, and many others, and so on.

Xin has received awards including “2015 Future Voice of Interaction Design” from IXDA, “40 Chinese Designers of 40 Years of Economic Reform and Opening,” “70 Designers of 70 Years of New China,” “Gold Medal Contribution to Design in China” from Dragon Design Foundation, 2018 Second Class National Teaching Award, 2013 “10 Best Industrial Design Educator of China,” etc.

May-Li is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher-designer-inventor who combines invention with cultural practices, bright colors, faces-on-things, and glitter. She most recently served as VP of Design at Khan Academy. Before that, she worked on new technologies at Apple. May-Li has worked with organizations ranging from IBM Research, the MIT Media Lab, and Dynamicland, to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Universal Music Group, and Oakland Museum of California. She also DJs, dances, and cultivates joyful ways to subvert the status quo.

Andrés is an Associate Professor of the Department of Design at the Universidad de los Andes. He is also a  researcher, and interdisciplinary artist whose work ranges from documentary video (in both science and art), to sound installation and telecommunication art. The spectrum of his research includes: media archaeology of Latin America, 3D-modeling of Photogrammetry technology and data-translation into digital media.

Una Lee is a graphic designer, co-design facilitator, and design justice advocate. Her designs have been stuffed in neighbourhood mailboxes, presented at the UN headquarters in Geneva, used to successfully exert political pressure on the Canadian House of Commons, and remixed in local community organizing efforts around the world. In addition to directing And Also Too, Una is also Allied Media Projects’ design director. She founded the Consentful Tech Project and is a co-founder of the Design Justice Network.

Ari is the founder of Afrotectopia, a social institution fostering interdisciplinary innovation at the intersections of art, design, technology, Black culture and activism through collaborative research and practice. She is a designer, creative technologist and researcher who is passionate about the relationships between various forms of design and sentient experiences. She teaches creative technology and design at NYU ITP and the Pratt Institute’s Communications Design school.

Andrea is a designer, speaker, and writer interested in systems, complexity, decoloniality, and learning. By day she is an executive coach who works with unconventional leaders to develop capacity, connect with inner knowing, cultivate power, and lead with clarity. By night she is the Vice President of the IxDA serving on the global Board of Directors. Prior to coaching, Andrea was a design and product executive at a number of start-ups, an English teacher at the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force, and the developer of the once-popular Oulipo WordPress Theme.

Dara is a Product Designer at Netflix and Founder of Afriquette – a media platform showcasing identity, culture, and creativity across Africa and its diaspora. Her career has included product and engineering at Microsoft, Twitter, Intel. Previously she lived and worked in West and Southern Africa, supporting early-stage startups, building creative community, and researching innovation and development across emerging and frontier markets.

Catt is a Product Designer at Asana, a game maker, and developer and co-organizer of the Game Devs of Color Expo. With a design career spanning over ten years, she has done design work for companies of all sizes including Etsy, SoundCloud, and Nasdaq. She is interested in ways to increase empathy through interactive media. Many of her personal projects focus on issues related to interpersonal relationships, self-expression, gender, and race.

Dan MakoskI is Chief Design Officer at Lloyds Banking Group, leading a multi-disciplinary human-centred team with the singular goal of helping Britain prosper through compassionate and courageous Design. His mission is to thoughtfully design epic experiences in collaboration with the people who inspire us to innovate.

Before joining the Group, Dan was Head of Design at the Fortune 1, Walmart, started Project ARA at Google, designed the original Surface at Microsoft, led design research globally at Motorola, and was the first VP of Design at Capital One. Dan began his career at the world’s top design agencies, and even started his own at one point.  The common thread across his career is the belief that Design is most powerful when it’s an expression of humble service, and innovation is most impactful when it fosters openness and inclusion.

Dan and his family moved to London in July 2018 directly from the Silicon Valley in California. He has 3 incredible kids who are now old enough to start exploring the world on their own – leaving him and his wife with lots of free time they don’t know how to use! When he isn’t talking about Design or his family, Dan loves to “bust a move” on the Hip Hop dance floor…so much so that he even knows seven versions of the running man.

Kevin Budelmann is a speaker, writer, educator, and entrepreneur interested in design theory and practice in the context of business, technology, and society. He is President of Peopledesign, a strategy and design firm, Global Vice President of IxDA, the Interaction Design Association, and an adjunct professor at Northwestern University, where he teaches information strategy. Kevin started his career winning a design competition for mobile computing for Apple, completing his undergraduate work a Carnegie Mellon University, later earning Master of Design Methods from The New Bauhaus – IIT Institute of Design.

Apeksha is VP of Design at Wealthfront where she leads design, research, and content strategy. Wealthfront is on a mission to democratize access to sophisticated financial advice for everyone. Previously she was at IDEO, an award winning design and innovation consulting company. She has over 10 years of experience championing human-centered design to help organizations create new businesses and reinvent existing ones. She has built and lead multi-disciplinary design teams that play a strategic role in an organization and are integral to the success of the business.

She fosters a strong culture of innovation and cross-functional collaboration to envision and build unprecedented products and services that often require defining new industry norms and ethical practices that are designed for people first. She believes in seeking insightful discoveries about human needs and behaviors and building a deep appreciation and understanding of technology to deliver new value that has sustainable positive impact on people, society and business.

Apeksha’s work has been recognized through awards and publications such as IDSA, Webby, FastCompany, Core77, designboom, Time Magazine, Wired, TechCrunch, CNN and The Verge. Her experience spans across industries such as consumer technology, finance, healthcare, automotive, education, furniture and retail. She has a Masters in Design from Institute of Design, IIT Chicago, and a degree in architecture.

As Galicia’s Bank Design Manager, he leads a passionate design community who push Human-centered approach as a key to deliver real value. We have the opportunity to impact millions, financial is everywhere.He’s former Head of Strategic Design and Transformation at Inter-Cultura. He has done design, training, consultancy and research project for companies like Globant, ICBC, BBVA, Grupo Clarin, Despegar, Tenaris, La Voz del interior, Avenida, Turner, among others.He devotes part of his time speaking at conferences and teaching innovation and design methodologies at UCA and ITBA.

An accomplished Designer and Design leader with extensive experience building and leading Design, Research & Product teams for global consumer brands. Nicola is at the forefront of driving creative and strategic design thinking, integrating & positioning this across complex global business environments, distilling complexity to deliver what’s right for the customer. With a solid focus on enabling and delivering rich product experiences, she works across research, physical, digital; overall UX to also help brands reposition and transform.  Having had a Design Career in Automotive design working for brands such as Ford, Hyundai and Kia she then moved on to Nokia inspired by their global reach and their ambition for connecting people.   For Microsoft Experiences and Devices group Nicola leads a human centered design team and approach that works to articulate disruptions, product and experience opportunities. Focusing on edge devices and looking to Ambient Futures, she is inspired by ambient computing, machine learning and our relationship with AI.

Having built, reshaped and led design teams across Europe, Scandinavia, Asia and the US, she has considerable experience leading multidisciplinary teams and maximizing on the diversity this brings. A passionate advocate for the human, she believes Design is a rich and diverse asset with the capacity to transform businesses, environments, products and experiences. Enrich and improve people’s lives.

Nicola has worked and lived as a design professional in the UK, Italy, Germany, Finland & the US.

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Yasaman Sheri is Design Director working with emerging technologies to explore possible and becoming futures. Her research focuses on interactions of humans, living things and machines, investigating synthetic sensing, perception systems and augmentation of body, objects and ecologies. Sheri lead the first consumer level Augmented Reality head mounted display, Microsoft Hololens Operating System called Windows Holographic, as well as autonomous vehicle human-machine interfaces at Google (X) and works with a variety of organizations, companies and institutions to direct and facilitate her expertise in mixed reality and spatial computing, gesture and voice interfaces, perception and sensing. She is also an educator at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID).

Sheri advocates for a more holistic thinking in design around biology expanding the anthropocentric approach in design to encompass larger living systems. most recently she was design resident in the leading biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks exploring biological sensors and is currently leading special projects on Augmented Intelligence at SPACE10 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Partner, Design at Work & Co. Founder of UX Collective & DOC. Based in Brooklyn, NY. 17+ years in digital product, shipping products for brands like Google, Samsung, Mailchimp, Equinox, Vista, and several startups. Member of the Awwwards jury, Adobe Design Circle, and AdCouncil UX Committee. Big believer in user-centered design and knowledge sharing.

Sadia Harper has spent more than 10 years exploring how people interact with products and experience and the world around them. Her career in design began at Crate & Barrel where she created physical retail environments as a store designer. She shifted to the digital space at YouTube where she explored user trends and created branded content experiences, and at Intel where she lead the UX development of their wireless charging initiative.

As a Strategist at Sterling Brands, Sadia developed brand and marketing strategies for companies like Google, YouTube and Facebook to help differentiate both their positioning and their product vision. Sadia has spent the most recent years focusing on UX research and strategy. Her work at Collective Health, fuseproject, and currently Instagram, is centered around uncovering user insights and creating a UX vision that unites design, product, and marketing in creating meaningful experiences that transform the people they come in contact with.

Her broad practice in design is impressive, ranging from video and story-telling to complex products and services, she is at the center of the digital economy while still maintaining a unique perspective on how design impact’s people’s lives at scale. These are reasons we are confident that she will be an incredible a guiding voice for our upcoming Jury.

Birgit is an Experience Design Director at adidas, serving a global audience with her team out of Amsterdam. She is driven by her passion for design and people and aspires to create environments in which good design can happen. With a strong sense of business and an emphasis on quality and teamwork, Birgit enables teams to design experiences that consumers love and businesses succeed by. Birgit is a seasoned design leader who strongly believes in giving back to the community. She has actively supported the global IxDA design community for many years and with equal passion for a number of initiatives: Founder of the Hamburg chapter (2010); Founding team member of the Interaction awards (2012); Regional Coordinator for Europe (& Africa) (2012-2016); Director Local Liaison of the Board of Directors (2017-present); Juror Interaction awards (2019).When time allows, she presents or teaches workshops at international conferences on a variety of design and communication topics.

Karen Ingram is a creative director, designer, and artist who uses her skill set to promote scientific awareness. She has a keen interest in the field of synthetic biology. As a Synthetic Biology LEAP fellow, she is recognized as an emerging leader. Karen co-authored “Biobuilder: Synthetic Biology in the Lab” (O’Reilly, 2015), a synthetic biology curriculum in which she crafted visual elements and teaching aides. She served as a design track judge at IGEM in 2015.

For more than four years, she has co-organized Brooklyn-based science cabaret, The Empiricist League. A long-time planning committee member of SXSW Interactive, Karen focuses on curating topics such as the overlap of science and art, emerging biotechnologies, and their effects on society. She’s a co-organizer of BioHTP (BioHack The Planet), a conference by biohackers, for biohackers. Her interest in science communications extends into the realm of education; she is a creative strategy instructor for NYU SHERP’s Entrepreneurial Science Journalism course.

A veteran in the world of digital design, advertising and marketing, Ingram has worked at Campfire, McCann Erikson (yes, that McCann), and UNICEF, to name a few. Her work has appeared in many publications including titles from Die Gestalten (Berlin), Scientific American, and The FWA, where she was named a “Digital Pioneer.” Ingram has written tutorials on digital design for Computer Arts magazine and New Riders publications. She has presented her work globally at Synbiobeta (London), the AIGA (New Orleans), Flash in the Can (Toronto), Biofabricate (New York), Synberc (MIT) and SXSW (Austin, TX).

Dan Lockton is a designer and researcher. He is Chair of Design Studies at Carnegie Mellon, where he is developing the Imaginaries Lab, a new group doing research through design. Dan’s work centers on people’s interactions with technology, and how that affects the way we think and act as a society. With the lab, he and a group of graduate students are developing projects around new metaphors (subject of a workshop at IxD18), sonification of energy use, mental landscapes, materializing mental health, qualitative interface design, and other areas bringing together new ways to think and new ways to live.

Dan is best known for the Design with Intent toolkit, a design pattern collection for environmental and social behavior change, and he regularly runs workshops and speaks at both academic and professional events. He has worked on a range of projects around sustainability and energy, including a collaboration with startup CarbonCulture, and SusLabNWE, a European Living Lab partnership. Before moving to the US, Dan was a researcher and tutor at the Royal College of Art, London, in the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design and the Innovation Design Engineering program. Many years ago he worked on the design of some unusual folding bikes for Sir Clive Sinclair, and wrote a book about the Reliant Motor Company. Dan studied Industrial Design Engineering at Brunel University, and Technology Policy at the University of Cambridge, and has a PhD in Design also from Brunel.

Nicolás Rebolledo is a strategic and service designer focused on the design and development of public service innovation processes. He is Tutor in Service Design, where he is currently completing his PhD and leading the Design for Policy Platform. This platform addresses the growing application of service design to not only transform public services delivered by government, third sector organisations and social enterprises but also the use of service design to develop policy. As leader of the platform, he coordinates the academic curriculum of design for public sector innovation, managing partnerships with the public sector, teaching and coordinating studio projects in the field.

An architect from the Catholic University of Chile, he holds an MSc in Technology Entrepreneurship from University College London. His PhD research is about the role of design in public innovation, policy design, digital services and urban service systems with the purpose of understanding how design is use in public innovation processes and how can impact both government transformation and the emergence of new service ecosystems. He has been Teaching Fellow of design for entrepreneurship at the School of Management of University College London (UCL).

Chi Ryan specializes in human-centered, experience-led design, strategy and innovation. Merging different design disciplines, Chi uses a transdisiplinary design approach to explore the intersection between business, technology and people to make meaningful things for humans – and humanity.

At Idean, a global experience design company on a mission to improve people’s lives through design, Chi leads the New York design practice. Chi Is an active member of the design community, regularly coaching, teaching and speaking about design around the world, and she’s also the host of This is HCD, a podcast that explores the diversity and breadth of human-centered design.

Chi has helped to transform the way 22 million people do tax, reimagine what happens when something goes wrong with your internet connection, use digital to keep low cost flights affordable, imagine how to make money a priority for Generation Z, design automated podcasting platforms, bring the internet to a tiny island in the Congo, inform the development of mobile applications that improve the way employees do their jobs, create way-finding systems that help travelers navigate the world’s biggest airports, build digital platforms that help banks provide better service to their customers, create retail experiences that makes shopping a destination and much, much more.

Haiyan Zhang is a designer, technologist and maker of things.

She is Innovation Director at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Inventing cutting-edge technology to enable new “Connected Play” experiences. She is also an inventor appearing in the BBC documentary, Big Life Fix.

In her 18-year career in the Technology sector, Haiyan has worked hands-on in software engineering, user experience, hardware R&D, service design, Cloud platforms, design thinking and blue-sky envisioning. She continues to push on the boundaries where technology can transform people’s lives for the better.

Haiyan was formerly Innovation Director at Lift London, a Microsoft Game Studio; Co-Founder and Design Lead for the innovation platform, OpenIDEO. With over 50,000 users worldwide solving challenges for social good and used as the enterprise innovation engine for organisations such as British Airways, DeutscheBank, Harvard Business School.

Working at the design consultancy, IDEO, she has created innovative tech experiences for community building, entertainment, financial services. She has worked with leading video game makers on research and ideas for new play experiences. Clients have included Mattel, Electronic Arts, HBO, Citibank, France Telecom, Alcatel, Cisco, and AT&T.

Haiyan’s work is informed by her previous profession as a software engineer and user interface designer creating applications for the biomedical and data-mining industries. As part of a team of software developers from Excel Tech in Canada, she created an electroencephalograph (EEG) visualization tool for intra-operative monitoring which is currently being used in hospitals across North America.

Haiyan has a Masters degree with Distinction in Interaction Design from the renowned Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, and has a Bachelor of Computer Science (First-Class Honours) from Monash University, Australia.

She has lived and worked in Australia, Toronto, China, Italy, San Francisco and now resides in London.

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Christina Xu is the chair of the 2018 Interaction Awards Jury. Her unique ability to unpack social interactions around technology and identify cultural trends through  her ethnographic approach, will offer insightful leadership for this years committee.

Christina currently runs her own research agency, Vernacular Systems. She has conducted exploratory research projects in China and the US for clients including GE, DaimlerChrysler, Spotify, and Quip. Her public work on China is collected as Multi Entry, a multimedia exploration of life in contemporary China.

As faculty at the School of Visual Arts’ MFA in Interaction Design program, she teaches a class called Entrepreneurial Design with Gary Chou. She is also an advisor to Data & Society, Orbital, and the Fine Chocolate and Cacao Institute.

Christina’s understanding of diverse and unique communities is informed by her experiences of helping several of them grow.These include: Letters for Black Lives, a set of collaboratively written and translated resources for facilitating conversations around social justice; the Awesome Foundation, a decentralized, global network of guerilla philanthropists; and ROFLCon, a conference/convention about internet culture that ran from 2008–2012. Her work has been profiled in BBC Worldwide, the Washington Post, NYT Magazine, the Atlantic, and Paper Magazine. She holds an A.B. in History of Science from Harvard College.

Mouna Andraos is the co-founder of Daily tous les jours, an interaction design studio that creates large scale interactive installations driven by collective experiences. The studio uses technology and storytelling to explore collaboration, the future of cities and the power of humans. It is best known for its work in public spaces, re-enchanting everyday life and stimulating playful encounters, conversations, and ultimately, igniting in people a sense of what is possible.

Daily tous les jours’s work has won numerous international recognitions including: Best in Show at the IxDA Interaction Awards, the Grand Prize at the UNESCO Shenzhen Design Awards, the Knight Cities Challenge for civic innovation, the Fast Company Innovation by Design Award, and theAmericans for the Arts Public Art Network Award.

Prior to co-founding Daily tous les jours, Mouna worked under the label Electronic Crafts exploring the intersection of mass-produced electronics and handmade crafts to create playful, sustainable, or participatory objects. Her web-based work for the interactive agency Bluesponge has won numerous international recognitions, including prizes from ID magazine, Best of Show at the SXSW Festival, and a CyberLion in Cannes.

Mouna holds a masters degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and is an alumni of Concordia University in Montréal, as well as the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City.

Tonia is a 20-year infographic design veteran. She has most recently been at The Boston Globe for almost two years, currently as deputy design director, She previously worked in the graphics departments at The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Newsweek, Associated Press,  and Canadian Press.

Marie Foulston is a playful curator and producer. She currently works as the Curator of Videogames at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as well as ‘Queen Roughouser’ with UK independent game collective Wild Rumpus. She has undertaken events and installations in London, San Francisco, Austin and Toronto alongside partners that have included MoPOP, Art Gallery of Ontario, GDC, Tumblr, BBC Worldwide, Humble Bundle. In addition, her work has been covered in Wired, the Guardian and Edge magazine. She says she has “a lot of love for the alternative, the absurd, the playful and the disruptive.”

Dan helps governments deliver digital services that meet user needs. He is former Editorial Director at Code for America, where he worked to make building digital government that works easy to understand and easy to copy. Dan also helped found the State of California’s first Digital Service.

Prior to Code for America, Dan took a detour into the world of advertising at Wieden+Kennedy in Portland, Oregon. At W+K, Dan was a Creative Director on Facebook, Sony and Nike accounts, where he helped combine the agency’s talent for creating emotional work with a native digital brand advertising, products and services strategy.

A recovered lawyer with an MSc in Software Engineering, Dan helped create Mind Candy’s alternate reality game Perplex City, and co-founded Six to Start, winner of SXSW’s Best of Show, Best Experimental and Best Game awards.

Niklas is a strategic design director with over a decade of experience in User Experience and Interaction Design.

Since 2003, Niklas has overseen a range of projects; consulting with everything from small start-ups to large brand owners. He is currently transforming businesses and solving intriguing problems alongside Designit’s team of researchers, strategists and designers within their service, product, brand, digital, interaction and user experience design practices.

Niklas is also a co-founder and Chairman of IxDA Oslo, a 2700+ strong non-profit organization for UX/IxD professionals that is part of the global Interaction Design Association. He was also the co-Chair for the 2014 and 2015 Interaction Awards.

Mimi Onuoha is a Brooklyn-based artist & researcher whose work explores missing data and the ways in which people are abstracted, represented, and classified. See her work here.

She is currently a Research Resident at Eyebeam, Artist in Residence at StudioXX, and a data journalism contributor at Quartz.

In the past she was a Data & Society Fellow, Visiting Researcher at the Royal College of Art,  Something-In-Resident at NYU ITP, as well as aColumbia University Tow Research Fellow.

Her interests include data collection  |  missing datasets  | sculptures about algorithms | teaching about maps & data  |  writing |  zines

Founder and managing director of Design Indaba,

Ravi Naidoo is the founder and managing director of Interactive Africa, a Cape Town-based company that combines marketing, project management, logistic prowess and creative production to work on projects that promote South Africa.

Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios designs extreme experiences for you to become an astronaut in your living room while dark energy is being created in your kitchen sink and a volcano erupts on your couch. Dubbed the ‘Willy Wonka of Design and Science’, award-winning director and Designer of Experiences Nelly Ben Hayoun is a critical explorer, a fearless and passionate provocateur. In 2014 Wired magazine awarded her with a WIRED Innovation Fellowship for her work to date and its ‘significant impact on the world’ whilst in 2013, Icon Magazine touted Ben Hayoun as one of the 50 international designers ‘shaping the future’. Finally in 2015, she was nominated for a Women of the Year Achievement Award which rewards, since 1955, women ‘who have made a significant achievement’ and ‘are being recognised for their strides in making the world a better place’. Ben Hayoun’s roles include Designer of Experiences at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, Head of Experiences at WeTransfer where she develops experiential content for the digital platform and its 90 millions active users, a member of the Space Outreach and Education committee at the International Astronautical Federation, a member of the British Interplanetary Society and Women in Aerospace, a postgraduate fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and researcher in Geography at Royal Holloway. She is a United Nations Advisor to the UN VR (Virtual Reality) labs, and a visiting professor at the Royal College of Arts and the Architectural Association.

Blasted from a Japanese launch pad, her projects have been orbiting around the earth in the International Space Station since May 2015. She assembled and directs the International Space Orchestra (ISO) – the world first orchestra of space scientists and astronauts from NASA. Her multilayered, experiential design practice has previously resulted in collaboration with grammy award winners musicians such as Beck, Damon Albarn, Bobby Womack, the Prodigy, Penguin Café, Ed Bangers Records, Savages and lately rock band Sigur Ros. She is a keynote speaker and she has spoken worldwide about the value of experiential design practices in the context of outreach, community and education. Her work has been exhibited at the National Museum of China, MOMA, V&A and other leading design institutions.

Ben Hayoun is the author and director of two feature length movies. Ben Hayoun was awarded one of the UK largest artistic award, The Arts Council England Exceptional Award for her project Disaster Playground considered as ‘really remarkable and of national importance’ (Peter Knott, Director, Arts Council England). Her latest feature length movie Disaster Playground, on emergency procedures and asteroids, was nominated for a Vision Award at SXSW 2015 and is distributed worldwide on Netflix and other digital platforms. Paola Antonelli, senior curator at MOMA declared about it ‘It’s Dr. Strangelove meets This Is Spinal Tap. You straddle a big red phone and go on a wild ride along a chain of command that is complex and exhilarating. Nelly and her studios have also worked and consulted for the likes of world class clients including NASA, Google HQ, Mailchimp HQ, BBC, Apple HQ, Air Bnb HQ, XL Recordings, Mattel HQ, and Autodesk amongst many others.

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www.nellyben.com  //

www.internationalspaceorchestra.com // www.spaceviking.org // www.micronationsrevolution.com // www.superksonic.nellyben.com

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Michelle is the Managing Director of Strategy & Innovation at LiquidHub. Her practice centers on guiding the vision and innovation efforts for digital customer experience with websites, social channels, e-commerce initiatives, software, portals and applications. Throughout her award-winning career, she has worked with brands like Coca-Cola, SAP, Kroger, Electrolux, Nike, Express and Hewlett-Packard, to build meaningful customer experiences across channels within the digital ecosystem and in the physical world.

Michelle is a Fellow in the Industrial Designers Society of America, has served as IDSA President and was recently named one of the 50 Most Influential Designers of the last 50 years by the membership. She serves on the boards for Good Design Australia and for the IxDA (Interaction Design Association). She has spoken and led workshops at conferences around the world, including Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Poland, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United States.

Born and raised in Italy, Rosa moved to London to study fashion
journalism, gathering experience at publications such as the Guardian,
Intersection, Soma Magazine and Amelia¹s Magazine.

Since 2007 she has worked at Wallpaper*, first as an assistant in the
editorial office of Wallpaper* City Guides and later as special projects
assistant and PA to the editor-in-chief, before becoming Design Editor.
Alongside her work for the magazine and website, she also oversees
Wallpaper* Handmade, an annual exhibition of specially commissioned,
one-of-a-kind pieces at Salone del Mobile, commissioning projects from
notable designers including Patricia Urquiola, Alfredo Häberli, Scholten &
Baijings and Noé Duchafour-Lawrance.

Rosa sits on the judging panel of the Dutch Design Awards and the Design
Guild Marks. She has written for numerous English and Italian language
publications, and worked as a copywriter and consultant for fashion and
design brands.

Giorgia Lupi is an information designer.

Her work in information visualization frequently crosses the divide between digital and print, exploring visual models and metaphors to represent dense and rich data-driven stories.

After graduating in Architecture at Ferrara University in 2006 she has been involved in multidisciplinary projects on the information, technology and interaction design fields, using design and data visualization to convey complex systems of information.

She is co-founder and design director at Accurat (accurat.it), an information design agency based in Milan and New York; Accurat analyzes data and contexts and designs analytical tools and visual narratives that provide awareness, comprehension and engagement. Accurat was born in 2011 and since then has been working successfully with important Italian and international clients such as the European Union, the United Nations, Audubon Society, Popular Science, and ING Direct.

She was visiting researcher at Parsons the New School for Design within PIIM (the Parsons Institute for Information Mapping). In 2014 she obtained the PhD cum meritum at Politecnico di Milano, within Density Design Lab.

Her work has been published and featured in magazines such as the New York Times, Wired, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Flash Art, Ottagono, Vogue, Corriere della Sera, l’Arca International, Courrier International, El Pais; and featured in recent books such as “Understanding the World – The Atlas of Infographics”, “The Best American Infographics”, “The information designers sketchbooks”, “An Infographic History of the world”, “Around the World: The Atlas for Today”, “Visual Simplexity”, “INFOGRAPHICS — Designing & Visualizing Data”.

Her work won important awards: Gold Medal for data-visualization and Special Mention for best studio at the Kantar Information is beautiful awards, Gold Medal for data journalism at O’Reilly Strata, Bronze Medal at Malofiej 2013, Bronze Lion at Cannes Festival 2013, Special Mention in Core77 Design Awards.

Eddie Opara studied graphic design at the London College of Printing and Yale University, where he received his MFA in 1997. He began his career as a designer at ATG and Imaginary Forces and worked as an art director at 2×4 before establishing his own studio, The Map Office, in 2005. He joined Pentagram’s New York office as partner in 2010.

A multifaceted designer, Opara’s work encompasses strategy, design and technology. His projects have included the design of interactive installations, websites, user interfaces and software, brand identity, publications, packaging, and environments, with many of his projects ranging across multiple media.

Opara has won numerous awards including a Gold Cube from the Art Directors Club and honours from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and I.D. magazine. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and has appeared in publications such as Archis, Surface, Graphis and I.D.

Opara is a visiting critic at the Yale School of Art and teaches narrative design at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. He has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Columbia University School of Architecture and the Yale University School of Art. He is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale, on the board of the New York Chapter of AIGA (the professional association for design), and was recently featured in Ebony magazine’s Power 100 Black American list for the December 2011/January 2012 issue.

Daljit Singh is a creative digital strategist with a global flair who deploys design methodology to solve big business issues. As the Principal Director, Design Strategy for Fjord in EALA (Europe, Africa, Latin America), Daljit collaborates with our European studios and design directors, and is an integral part of the leadership team across EALA.

Having founded his own agencies and collaborated with design visionaries like Sir Terence Conran, he has 20 years’ experience in the digital interactive communications industry and is a fixture on the Financial Times’ annual Top 50 Creative Minds listing.

Daljit founded creative business consultancy, Happiness, in 2012. From 2010-2012, he was founding partner of Conran Singh, the then digital arm of Sir Terence Conran’s empire. He joined Conran Group from Digit, the pioneering digital agency he founded in 1996 and sold to WPP in 2005.

At Digit, Daljit stayed true to his vision of ‘simple human interaction.’ He put a great emphasis on a rigorous user-centric and design led R&D program, applying his innovation to create cutting-edge entertainment and communications across all digital output including games and interface design. He joined Digit after spending three years as Interaction Designer at IBM.

Daljit’s work has been recognized with a D&AD Black Pencil Award, Design Week Best of Show and two BAFTA’s. His work and thinking has been on display at exhibitions at The ICA and Centre Pompidou. He was a former curator of The Future of Luxury at London’s V&A Museum.

Daljit has made an indelible mark on the digital interactive communications industry and has been instrumental in pushing the boundaries of digital. At Fjord, he will guide the team to push the boundaries of what service design can do.

Back in 2012, Daljit launched his own food brand into three major supermarkets in the UK – Mr. Singh’s Bangras Indian sausages, inspired by his grandfather who used to make them for the whole family when Daljit was growing up in East London.

Kim Goodwin, bestselling author of Designing for the Digital Age, has more than 20 years of both consulting and in-house UX experience. Recently she began serving as VP of Product and User Experience at PatientsLikeMe, a medical research platform and a social and decision-support network for patients. Kim also continues to help other organizations build their internal design capabilities through coaching and organizational change management.

Previously, Kim was VP of Design & General Manager at Cooper, a leading design and strategy agency in San Francisco. During her 12 years there, Kim led an integrated practice of interaction, visual, and industrial designers, and also led development of the acclaimed Cooper U design curriculum.

Kim has led design and research projects in such diverse areas as health care, aviation, retail, communication, financial services, consumer, automotive, IT and others. She regularly speaks and teaches at UX conferences around the world. Although based near San Francisco, Kim is often in another time zone either “herding cats” in a conference room or photographing wildlife in places where Internet access doesn’t exist.

Amber Case is an entrepreneur and researcher helping Fortune 500 companies design, build, and think about connected devices. She is the former co-founder and CEO of Geoloqi, a location-based software company acquired by Esri in 2012. She spoke about the future of the interface for SXSW 2012’s keynote address, and her TED talk “We are all cyborgs now” has been viewed over a million times. Named one of National Geographic’s Emerging Explorers, she’s been listed among Inc Magazine’s 30 under 30 and featured among Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology.

Case is the author of Calm Technology and An Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology from O’Reilly Books. She is a passionate advocate of privacy and the future of data ownership, and is interested in furthering the ideas of calm technology, wearable computing, and the future of the interface. Amber lives and works in Portland, Oregon; you can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic and learn more at caseorganic.com.

Brenda Laurel has worked in interactive media since 1976. She will soon announce details of her new consulting group, Neogaian Interactive, which provides design research, strategy, and development with a humanistic focus. In the recent past, she served as an adjunct full professor in Computational Media and Digital Arts and New Media at U. C. Santa Cruz. Prior to that, she served as professor and founding chair of the Graduate Program in Design at California College of Arts (2006-2012). She designed and chaired the graduate Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (2001-2006) and was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs (2005-2006) where she was co-author of a patent for a new UI for cable television and film.

Based on her research in gender and technology at Interval Research (1992-1996), she co-founded Purple Moon in 1996 to create interactive media for girls. In 1990 she co-founded Telepresence Research, Inc., focusing on virtual reality and remote presence. She co-designed and directed the Placeholder virtual reality project at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1993, also supported by Interval Research. Placeholder was the first VR projects to decouple gaze from direction of movement, provide two hands to participants, support two participants at once, represent multiple traversable locations, capture imagery from the natural landscape, and design content in the realms of art and fantasy rather than training applications. At Apple (1988-1991), she worked on projects including Vivarium (researching narrative and programming under the auspices of Alan Kay) and Guides, a prototype encyclopedia with a storytelling interface. She began her west-coast career at Atari, first as a software strategist and then as a Member of the Research staff at the Atari Systems Research Laboratory, where she developed a theory of first-person presence in interactive environments and worked with AI to improve the quality of interactive games (1979-1983).

Brenda earned her MFA in Acting/Directing (1975) and her PhD in Drama Theory and Criticism at Ohio State University (1986) with a thesis entitled “Toward the Design of an Interactive Fantasy System.” Her books include The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990), Computers as Theatre (1991, 1993), Utopian Entrepreneur (2001), Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2004), and Computers as Theatre, Second Edition (2013) is revised and expanded to speak to contemporary interaction designers. Her essay, Gaian IXD, was the cover article of the Sept.-Oct. 2011 issue of the journal Interactions. She consults and teaches workshop courses in Design Research, Critique, Methods for Innovation and Creativity, and Civility. She is also an underwater photographer and part-time abalone diver.

Originally from Brazil, Itamar currently lives in Bonn (Germany) where he works as Senior User Experience Designer at Roamworks and promotes User Experience Design as visiting lecturer at Köln International School of Design. He has been a juror for several international design competitions, including the first IxDA global Student Design Challenge in 2010.

Working in the Information Technology industry since 1998, Itamar has helped global companies based in numerous countries (Brazil, China, Germany, The Netherlands, United Emirates, United States, Hong Kong) create great user experience through his advocacy of Design and Innovation principles. During seven years in China, he championed the User Experience Design discipline as User Experience Manager at Autodesk as well as Local Leader of the IxDA Shanghai chapter.

As an Information Design specialist, Itamar has served on the board of the Brazilian Society of Information Design and held lecturing positions including Guest Lecturer of Interaction Design at Köln International School of Design (Germany), Lecturer of Hypermedia at the Department of Design of Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (Brazil), Visiting Lecturer of Design Practice at École de Design Nantes Atlantique (France), Guest Lecturer of Design Thinking at Lasalle College (Mexico), and Assistant Program Director of the Visual Communication Department of Raffles Design Institute at DongHua University (China).

Born in Congo of Indian parents and raised in Zaïre, Alok is now based in Brussels, where he has studied engineering, management and film (Licence en Philosophie et Lettres). As a designer, creative director, design strategist, writer-director, he explores conflicting constraints in evolving and hybrid contexts via his design agency Architempo. He is dealing with storytelling in multiple media, space and technologies, from high-tech interactive installations (Extrafiction framework, science museums) to low-tech mise-en-scene (Cannes Film Festival exhibition, Jules Verne exhibition design, public space interventions). His previous professional experience includes brand management at Procter & Gamble and interactive creative direction at both Casterman (the publisher of Tintin a.o.) and Groupe Flammarion.

Alok is a lecturer and invited professor as well as regular speaker at international conferences (including TEDx). In parallel, he launched PechaKucha Brussels and initiated the Belgian presence of IxDA. Alok co-chaired Interaction14 in Amsterdam and currently serves on the IxDA Board of Directors.

Leisa has just relocated from London to Sydney where she joins the Digital Transformation Office in the Australian government as Head of Service Design and User Research. Theres, she is building a multidisciplinary team focused on transforming public service design.

In her previous role as Head of User Research at the UK Government Digital Service in the Cabinet Office, Leisa led a team of user researchers who work in agile, multidisciplinary teams to help continuously connect the people who design public services with the people who use them. The user research team ensures that government understands what user needs really are and supports experimentation as well as ongoing learning in iterative service design.

She is most proud of helping to build a cross-government community of UK user researchers that now includes dozens of skilled, enthusiastic professionals who share knowledge and experience across departmental boundaries, and who have made a real difference in the design of services used by millions of people every day across the country.

Previously Leisa has worked as a consultant to clients including Virgin Atlantic, BBC, HSBC, The Economist, Transport for London, University of Surrey, the Drupal community, Tourism Australia, Moo, SkimLinks and Touchnote and many others. She mentored at Seedcamp, coordinated the London UX Bookclub and has spoken at numerous UX conferences. Leisa blogs at disambiguity.com and you can follow her on Twitter @leisa

Sudhir is the founder of INDI Design, based in India, which he is developing into a multinational network of designers and associates to use design expertise in service of society and business. The network has 9 international offices and 6 offices in India.

With over 26 years of experience working in design, Sudhir is the founder and president of Design India (India’s largest social community of professional designers) and is Chief Editor/Publisher of POOL Magazine (for Design, Innovation and Art). POOL recently released its 60th issue and 2nd Annual publications. Sudhir is an alumnus of the World Economic Forum’s World Design Council, was on the inaugural design jury at the 2008 Cannes Lions Festival, and Adfest 2009, was on the jury of Dutch Design Awards 2011 and 2012, as well as Design Turkey. He has been involved in successful and award-winning transformation of many household brands in India; he writes and lectures on the role of Design in Society and Cultures.

Sudhir leads projects in industrial design, retail design, brand strategy, museum designs, go-to-market plans, communications, user interaction design and qualitative cultural research. He graduated from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and holds a number of board positions for both commercial and educational organisations. Sudhir was awarded the “Most Promising Entrepreneur of the Year” 2009 for his contributions to India’s design business industry.

Sudhir passionately believes that design thinking can alter the fortunes of organisations and the economy of a country. Brands need to simplify their pitch to the consumer and coordinate the experience with the content that they offer. Simple, straightforward execution of a complex strategy is an easy way to enter the hearts of consumers in these chaotic times.

Richard Buchanan, PhD, is a professor of design, management, and information systems. Before joining the Weatherhead faculty in 2008, he served as head of the school of design and then as director of doctoral studies in design at Carnegie Mellon University. While at Carnegie Mellon, he inaugurated interaction design programs at the master’s and doctoral level.

Dr. Buchanan is well-known for extending the application of design into new areas of theory and practice, writing and teaching as well as practicing the concepts and methods of interaction design. He argues that interaction design does not stop at the flatland of the computer screen, but extends into the personal and social life of human beings and into the emerging area of service design, as well as into organizational and management design.

In keeping with this conviction, Buchanan has worked on the redesign of the Australian Taxation System, the restructuring of service products and information for the U.S. Postal Service, and other consulting activities. At Weatherhead, he has pursued research into “collective interactions,” focusing on problems of organizational change and the development of management education around the concept of Manage by Designing. His most recent projects involve strategy and service design, including patient experience, information services, and public sector design.

Buchanan is a widely published author and frequent speaker. His books include Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies, The Idea of Design, and Pluralism in Theory and Practice. He is coeditor of Design Issues, the international journal of design history, theory, and criticism; and has served for two terms as President of the Design Research Society, the international learned society of the design research community, with offices located in the U.K. In 2009, Buchanan received an honorary doctorate from the Faculté de l’aménagement (Environmental Design Faculty) at the University of Montréal.

Co-founder and Co-Chairman of Cooper and Software Alchemist

Alan Cooper has been a pioneer in the software world for more than 40 years and, in his role today as éminence grise in the user experience field, he continues to influence a new generation of web designers and entrepreneurs.

In 1992, Alan and his wife, Sue, co-founded the first interaction design consulting firm, Cooper. Within a few years Cooper had established the basic design methods that are used across the industry today and helped to popularize the notion that digital technology shouldn’t terrorize its human users. In particular, his invention, design personas, are almost universally used in the field. He shared his tools, knowledge, and experience in two best-selling books, still in print and widely referenced.

In 1988 Alan invented a dynamically extensible visual programming tool and sold it to Bill Gates, who released it to the world as Visual Basic, arguably the most successful programming language ever. This is how Alan earned the sobriquet, “The Father of Visual Basic.” He started his first software company in 1976 and produced what has been called “The first serious business software for microcomputers.”

Today, Alan continues to advocate for more humane technology from his 50-acre former dairy farm in the rolling hills north of San Francisco.

Amy Ip is a Design Director / Design Expert at Internet Social User Experience (ISUX), Department of Social Networking Group, Tencent Company.

Amy has been guest lecturer/speaker at various university including Beijing University, Hong Kong University SPACE, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Prior to joining Tencent, Amy was a Senior User Experience Designer in Microsoft at Redmond, USA. She has participated in various communication and social networking projects including Lync, Windows Live Messenger and Spaces.  Amy was also the first Interaction Designer hired at Yahoo! Hong Kong in 2003, helping to integrate User Experience Design in the development process for Hong Kong and was one of the UX advocates at the Asian offices.  She was also dedicated to developing design tools and repository to help teams work more efficiently, initiating the Pattern Library for Chinese language region during her stay at Yahoo!.

Amy is an Interaction Designer with a background in Information and Decision Systems. She received a Master’s Degree in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University, USA. She loves to travel and has a strong interest in studying cultural impacts on communication and design.

Kim Lenox ships pioneering products with a lasting influence by applying two basic principles: Openness leads to invention; and we can be ambitious and pragmatic without being dogmatic.

She fosters collaborative environments that give designers, engineers, product owners, and clients the comfort to explore, so they can invent. Offering each person the space to do their best work, she gives them the confidence to come together to make something new—riffing, challenging, and pushing themselves, and each other, from a place of assurance.

This open and very human approach has allowed Kim to create hardware, software, and digital products that change how consumers interact with the world. With the flexibility to adjust to uncertainty, she’s developed products that have made their mark on interaction design, like WebOS re-imagined for tablets and phones at Palm/HP, as well as concepts that continue to shape consumer products at Samsung.

Kim is a Senior Design Manager at LinkedIn. She is known for her ability to build relationships with clients and cross-functional teams, and has also led the design of product experiences for clients as an independent consultant, and previously with LUNAR and Adaptive Path.

Kim is also a leader in the design community, serving on the IxDA Board of Directors, speaking internationally, and serving as a juror for the D&AD Awards. She holds a BFA in photography.

Lavrans Løvlie literally co-wrote the book on Service Design. He has worked as a design consultant since 1994. Before setting up live|work in London he worked as an Interaction Designer in Norway and Denmark. As a partner in live|work, Lavrans has been lead designer on service innovation projects for Sony Ericsson, Sony, Aviva/Norwich Union, the BBC, airport operator BAA, the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for Health Services, the UK Design Council, Orange, Vodafone, Mustad, Fast, the Interactive Institute in Sweden as well as UK regional development agency ONE North East. Lavrans has also served on the committee responsible for the new British Standard for Service Design. During the last years, Lavrans has lectured and run seminars at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (Italy), Köln International School of Design (Germany), Oslo School of Architecture (Norway), University of Art and Design Helsinki (Finland), the Estonian Academy of Arts and Cranfield School of Management (UK).

Dina Dastur Mehta: Co-Founder, Convo Research and Strategy, is based in Mumbai, India. With a background in sociology and anthropology Dina has twenty-five years specializing in qualitative research and ethnography. She works with organisations to uncover new possibilities, frame opportunities and design solutions that accelerate business growth. Convo creates immersive and real-time learning environments online and offline, and aims to reveal new stories and metaphors as well as develop deep insight to stimulate strategic conversations about change.

Dina has covered a wide range of products and services in consumer durables, FMCG, social sector, foods and beverages, financial services, healthcare, technology, social computing, mobility, automobiles, luxury products, etc. Working with multidisciplinary teams, her findings form the basis for innovative products and services for emerging consumer markets in the developing world. She loves conducting technology trends research in urban and rural India and works on projects with global companies, including learning journeys and immersions, and co-creation workshops for innovation teams. She’s particularly fascinated by emerging mobile and social technologies – the way they change how people live, love, work and play; the needs they fulfill, the pain points they resolve.

Dina has also guided many online networking communities and non-profit organisations, and calls herself an accidental information activist. Her perspectives, blogging and participation in social media have earned her acclaim, and she is a TED Fellows.  She has presented papers at Indian and global conferences on social media evolution, emerging qualitative and ethnographic research practices like blographies and participant co-creation, future of insights, etc.

Dr. Jeremy Yuille is a designer, educator and exuberant learner. While he loves designed objects, he’s more interested in framing design as a practice that creates value and connects disciplines. His work spans strategic design for civic engagement & participatory democracy, digital presentation platforms, and baking creativity into education. Jeremy is a director emeritus of the IxDA, and Senior Lecturer with the Communication Design program and Design Futures Lab at RMIT University. He tweets @overlobe.

Dr. Genevieve Bell is an anthropologist and researcher with 15 years of experience driving innovation in the high tech industry. As the Director of Interaction and Experience Research in Intel Labs, Bell leads a team of social scientists, interaction designers, human factors engineers and computer scientists. This organization researches new computing experiences that are centered around people’s needs and desires. This foundationally shapes and then helps to create new Intel technologies and products. In this team and her prior roles, Bell has fundamentally altered the way Intel envisions and plans its products so that they are centered on people’s needs rather than simply silicon capabilities.

In addition to leading this increasingly important area at Intel, Bell is an accomplished industry commentator on the intersection of culture and technology and has been extensively featured in publications that include Wired, Forbes, The Atlantic, Fast Company, and the Wall Street Journal. She is a regular public speaker and panelist at technology conferences worldwide, sharing myriad insights gained from her extensive international field work and research. In 2010, Bell was named one of Fast Company’s inaugural ‘100 Most Creative People in Business.’ Bell is a passionate advocate for the advancement of women in technology and in 2012 was inducted into the Women In Technology International (WITI) hall of fame, as well being honored by the Anita Borg Institute as the 2013 Woman of Vision for Leadership. Her first book, ‘Divining the Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing,’ was co-written with Prof. Paul Dourish of the University of California at Irvine and released in April 2011. Bell is also the recipient of several patents for consumer electronics innovations.

A native of Australia, Bell moved to the United States for her undergraduate studies and graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology. She then earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in cultural anthropology from Stanford University where she also taught as an acting lecturer in the Department of Anthropology from 1996-1998.

Anab Jain invents stories, scenarios, products and experiences that imbue our everyday lives with a sense of the magical, and provoke thought and reflection around the near future. She is the Founder and Co-Director of London and India based design studio Superflux. Working both as a client-facing Consultancy as well as a more open-ended research Lab, the studio’s projects range from the wildly speculative to the immediately applicable, but always with a focus on humanising technology and its implications. Recent clients include Sony, Forum for the Future, Imagination, Prince’s Foundation, Government of UAE, European Commission, Microsoft Research Cambridge, Design Council and Mattel Toys. Originally from India, she has a Masters in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art and has been a TED Fellow since 2009. Her work has won awards from Apple Computers Inc., UNESCO, and ICSID, and has been exhibited at MoMA New York, Science Gallery Dublin, National Museum of China and London Design Festival amongst others. She has lectured at the Royal College of Art, VCU Qatar, CIID, University of Dundee, Goldsmiths and Architectural Association.

Simona Maschi’s main focus is on envisioning future scenarios and experiences for people’s everyday life. In particular, she designs new concepts of services enabled by innovative technologies for both the public and the private sector. She is interested in new design solutions that support companies towards a stronger attitude to environmental and social responsibility. Her last works in collaborations with academia and industry have explored different topics, such as private and public transportation, health and wellbeing sustainable housing and smart cities.

Simona is an expert in Service Design, Interaction Design, Scenario Design and Design Methods. Prior to CIID Simona was a lecturer at the Danisg Design School, at the IT University of Copenhagen, and at the Politecnico University in Milan. From 2001 to 2006 she was an Associate Professor and researcher at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. She has been a visiting lecturer in European and American schools, an invited lecturer and trainer at international design workshops, and is an active organiser of industry-focused workshops, seminars and training.

Simona has a Ph.D in Industrial Design and Multimedia Communication from the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy (2002). She was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago (2002) and has an MA in Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy (1996).

Matt Nish-Lapidus holds a degree in new media art, and has a rich background as a practicing musician and designer. His work has included everything from the digital library catalog in use by the New York Public Library, enterprise software for hospitals, video games, and large-scale public installations. He spent the first few years of his career assisting international new media artists such as Stelarc, David Rokeby, and Haruki Nishijima, while developing his own art and design practice.

Matt loves to debate about art, politics, music, and just about anything else. He currently leads a design team at Normative in Toronto, Canada where he focuses on design practice development in a 21st century studio and is also a member of the Board of Directors for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), a global organization dedicated to the development of the interaction design practice.

Fiona Raby is a partner in the design partnership Dunne & Raby, established in 1994.

She is professor of Industrial Design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and a Reader in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London.

Dunne & Raby use design as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies.

Their work has been exhibited at MOMA, the Pompidou Centre, and the Science Museum in London and is in the permanent collections of MOMA, V&A, FRAC and FNAC. They have published two books: Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects (Princeton Architectural Press) and Hertzian Tales (MIT Press). A new book Speculative Everything; design, fiction and social dreaming, will be published by MIT Press in late 2013.

Aaron Siegel is a transdisciplinarian with a concentration in computational information design. He received his BFA in Digital Media Art from the Cadre Laboratory for New Media at San Jose State University in 2006, and his MFA in Design|Media Art from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008.

His motivation comes from interesting data sets, interfaces, and social justice applications. He utilizes data visualization as a medium to explore complex systems, aiming to create aesthetic representations of data while fostering scientific empiricism. His work strives to display relationships and correlations within information systems that would remain unseen from any other perspective.

He has created work for various institutions including UCLA, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Electroland, Directed Play, the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory and Facebook. He has exhibited work in Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Reno, Memphis, Indianapolis, Seattle, New York, Guadalajara, Madrid, Trieste, Heidelberg and Singapore.

Aaron is currently the Head of Interaction and Online Experience at Fabrica.

Xin holds a PhD in Design from Carnegie Mellon University with research interests in interaction and service design, cultural studies, and product development. He looks at how design, both professionally and philosophically, contributes to transformations of lifestyles, businesses and societies.

Xin is currently leading a “Redesign Design Education” movement in China. It aims to reform design education responding to the extending scope and evolving principles of design, from “logic of things to logic of behaviors.”

Xin has internationally spoken and conducted workshops on interaction design and cultural innovation, and has served as a guest professor widely in China including Tsinghua University and Shenyang University of Technology. His professional practices covers a variety of industries with partners including United States Postal Services, Efficiency Unit of Hong Kong Government, P&G, Changhong, ASTRI (Applied Science and Technology Research Institute Ltd., Hong Kong), Philips and etc.

Xin has actively served for professionally communities. He is the current 1) President of Experience Design Committee, Shenzhen Industrial Design Society, 2) Direct of Technology and Research, Jiangsu Provincial Associations of Industries of Industrial Design, 3) Vice President of Interaction Design Committee, Guangdong Provincial Industrial Design Association, 4) national board member, Industrial Design Group, Chinese Association of Engineers. Xin had also co-founded and served as the first Chair of IDSA China Chapter.

After a first career as a software developer, Marc found that the field of design allowed him to combine his passions for ethnographic methods, language, systems thinking, and people. In 2005 he co-founded Fit Associates, which uses research, facilitation, cultural immersion, and coaching to connect clients’ design and strategic decisions to life outside the cubicles, and to their own core purpose. Marc’s client list includes Philips Home Healthcare, Whirlpool, Comcast, Microsoft, and BBC. He has taught both lecture and studio courses at Carnegie Mellon’s Graduate School of Design and the IIT Institute of Design. Marc frequently speaks and conducts hands-on workshops in industry and academic settings around the world, and he is a faculty member of the groundbreaking Masters in Design for Social Innovation program at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Steve Baty, principal at Meld Studios, has over 15 years experience as a design and strategy practitioner. Steve actively contributes to public discourse on these topics through the design community, articles and conferences. Steve serves as President of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and sits on the Good Design Council of Australia. He is the founder of UX Book Club; co- Chair of Australia's UX Australia, Service Design, and Agile UX conferences; and served as Chair of Interaction12 – the annual conference of the IxDA for 2012.

Liz Danzico is chair of the MFA in Interaction Design program. With more than fourteen years of experience as a user experience professional, Liz makes information useful, usable, and delightful. She has organized information across a variety of industries, including retail, publishing, media and entertainment, and financial services.She is also an independent consultant, working with businesses to explore the relationship audiences have with their products and services through design research, information architecture, and by leading teams of experience design groups. Recent projects have included work for This American Life, The TED Prize, and Teach for All.

Matías Duarte leads the Android User Experience team. He’s responsible for all aspects of the software and visual experience across the Android platform and core applications services, and the design of Nexus tablets and phones. Prior to Google, Matías spearheaded the design of several lauded consumer devices and computing platforms. As VP of Human Interface at Palm, he led the design of the WebOS operating system. As VP of User Experience at Helio, he created the Ocean series of 2 way sliders, and as Director of Design at Danger he led the design of the T-Mobile Sidekick. Matías received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in College Park. His ongoing mission is to make computers delightful.

Kate Hartman is an artist, technologist, and educator whose work spans the fields of physical computing, wearable electronics, and conceptual art. She is the co-creator of Botanicalls, a system that lets thirsty plants place phone calls for human help, and the Lilypad XBee, a sewable radio transceiver that allows your clothing to communicate. Her work has been exhibited internationally and featured by the New York Times, BBC, CBC, NPR, in books such as “Fashionable Technology” and “Art Science Now”. She was a speaker at TED 2011 and her work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Hartman is based in Toronto at OCAD University.

Dan Hill is a designer and urbanist. Throughout a career focused on integrating design, technology, cities and people, Dan has been responsible for shaping many innovative, popular and critically acclaimed products, services, spaces and strategies. He is CEO of Fabrica, the Benetton group communications research center. Prior to Fabrica, Dan was Strategic Design Lead at Sitra – the Finnish Innovation Fund, an Associate at Arup, Web & Broadcast Director for Monocle, and Head of Interactive Technology & Design for the BBC. He writes the well-known blog cityofsound.com, as well as being Interaction Design Editor for Domus.

Ben Pieratt is a freelance identity and product designer. Ben has designed and launched a number of his own digital products, most recently acting as the CEO and designer of Svpply.com, one of the first successful visual shopping experiences built for the web. After selling Svpply to eBay, Ben now focuses on helping young startups find their identity through their branding and early launch strategies. His work has been shown in such publications as WIRED, Hacker Monthly, GQ Italia, and American Trademarks. In all of his work, Ben is most known for his unique sense of style, humor and editorial voice.

Robert Fabricant is Co-Founder and Partner of Dalberg Design, where he brings human-centered design and innovation services to clients looking for new, creative approaches to breakthrough innovation and expanded collaborations in the field of social impact and international development.Before Dalberg, Robert Fabricant was the Vice-President of Creative for frog design, where he managed frog’s global leadership across Design Research, Product Design, Software Design, and Experience Strategy. He also led frog’s efforts to grow and extend its creative capabilities into new markets and offerings. Robert incubated and led frog’s Design for Social Impact practice through initiatives such as Project Masiluleke that focus on transformative opportunities to use mobile technologies to increase access to information and accelerate positive behavior change.Robert writes about Design and Social Impact for publications like HBR, SSIR, Fast Company, Rotman Business Journal, MIT Tech Review, ChangeObserver, and Core77. He is a sought-after speaker on topics ranging from design to healthcare and mobility. Recent speaking engagements include Poptech, SXSW, IxDA, Mayo Transform, Harvard Business School, and others. He has won numerous design awards including 2009 & 2011 IDEA Gold and 2009 Index Award Finalist. He is a member of the adjunct faculty at NYU and SVA.His client portfolio includes experience across verticals including financial services and financial inclusion, social impact, mobile and technology, healthcare and public health, and media.Robert has an MPS in Design and Technology from NYU and a BA from Yale University.

Massimo Banzi is the co-founder of the Arduino project. He is an Interaction Designer, Educator and Open Source Hardware advocate. He has worked as a consultant for clients such as: Prada, Artemide, Persol, Whirlpool, V&A Museum and Adidas.Massimo started the first FabLab in Italy which led to the creation of Officine Arduino, a FabLab/Makerspace based in Torino.He spent 4 years at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea as Associate Professor. Massimo has taught workshops and has been a guest speaker at institutions all over the world.Before joining IDII he was CTO for the Seat Ventures incubator. He spent many years working as a software architect, both in Milan and London, on projects for clients like Italia Online, Sapient, Labor Party, BT, MCI WorldCom, SmithKlineBeecham, Storagetek, BSkyB and boo.com.Massimo is also the author of “Getting Started with Arduino” published by O'Reilly. He is a regular contributor to the italian edition of Wired Magazine and Che Futuro, an online magazine about innovation.He currently teaches Interaction Design at SUPSI Lugano in the south of Switzerland and is a visiting professor at ICID in Copenhagen.

Janna is an experienced researcher and designer with a background in psychology, social science and anthropology.Her work focuses on humanising products and services, defining the strategic plan, and positioning of products and services down to the most detailed of interactions within them.Janna has had the privilege to lead design work across many industries, designing for both the customer experience and the organisational experience.Janna served as President of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) Board of Directors, as well as the Co-Chair of the global Interaction Awards.

Matt has been designing digital products and services since 1995. Creative director for the launch of BBC News Online, he co-founded and designed Dopplr.com, a service for frequent travellers since sold to Nokia. Between 2003-2005, he worked at Nokia on areas as diverse as tangible/ physical interfaces and the human experience of play. He is now Principal at BERG, a design and invention company in London. He originally studied Architecture, has written on interaction design, amongst other things, for 10 years at magicalnihilism.com and teaches on the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art.

Younghee is leading the NokiaResearch Center in Bangalore, India. Her research centers on the social potential of mobile technology and behavioral change. Over the last decade, she has managed and created interdisciplinary teams of insight, design and innovation in Helsinki, Tokyo and London. She earned a B.S. in Industrial Design at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) and M.A. in Interaction Design at Carnegie Mellon University as Fulbright Scholar. Her current work focuses on basic enablers of mobile technology use for growth markets, suitable for the local culture and its potentials.

Jonas Löwgren is professor of interaction design and co-founder at the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University, Sweden. He specializes in cross-media products, interactive visualization and the design theory of digital materials. Jonas has taught interaction design in university courses and in companies since the early 1990’s and initiated the influential two-year master’s program in interaction design at Malmö University in 1998. He has published some 50 peer-reviewed scientific papers and three books, including Thoughtful Interaction Design. His design portfolio comprises some 50 projects from explorative research and professional contexts.

Helen is a writer, editor and researcher at innovation consultancy Doblin, part of the Monitor Group. A journalist with experience editing and publishing content across multiple platforms, Helen was previously the editor of innovation and design at Bloomberg Businessweek. She is contributing editor at Creative Review magazine in the United Kingdom while she writes about creativity and design for numerous international publications, including Core77, Design Observer and Fast Company. She curates the website, thoughtyoushouldseethis.com and is the author of a number of design-related books.