Jury Alumni

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  Kotchakorn Voraakhom

  Founder and CEO, Porous City Network

  2020 Design for Social Impact Jury Member

  Kotchakorn Voraakhom is a landscape architect from Thailand who works on building productive green public spaces that tackle climate change in urban dense areas and vulnerable communities. She created the first critical green infrastructure for Bangkok, the Chulalongkorn Centenary Park, and is currently planning the opening of a 36-acre urban farm rooftop featuring the biggest urban farming green roof in Asia.
  
  Voraakhom was featured in the 2019 “TIME 100 Next” list as one of 15 leading women fighting against climate change and the “Green 30 for 2020” by Bloomberg. She is Chairwoman on the Landscape Architects Without Borders working group of the International Federation of Landscape Architects, Asia Pacific Region (IFLA APR).
  
  Voraakhom received her Master's in landscape architecture from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. Currently she is also a TED Fellow and an Echoing Green Fellow.

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  Martin Postler

  Founder, PostlerFerguson

  2017 Consumer Product Jury Captain

  Martin Postler (born Germany 1977) studied Industrial Design at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design, graduating with a Diplom (MA aequivalent) in 2004. He received his MA Design Products in 2007 from the Royal College of Art and Kyoto University of Arts.
  
  Martin worked for diverse design agencies in Hamburg, Hong Kong and London for clients including Boeing, Lufthansa, Airbus, Nokia and Deutsche Telekom and received numerous awards including the Raymond Loewy Foundation Award, Red Dot, IF Design, DAAD and Invent Scholarship from the German Ministry of Education. From 2011 - 2015 he taught at the Royal College of Art Design Products Departement.
  
  Along with Ian Ferguson, he is a founder and director of PostlerFerguson, an industrial design office creating products for a meaningful future. PostlerFerguson works with clients to design and develop products combining bold creative vision with refined technical solutions. With offices in London and Hamburg, they have an international roster of clients including LG Electronics, Nike, Acoustic Research, Nudeaudio, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Victoria and Albert Museum.
  
  In 2011, he also co-founded PostlerFerguson’s sister company in Hong Kong, Papafoxtrot, a lifestyle and wood toy company. They produce a range of wood toys based on modern industrial marvels and the Staeckler shoe display systems. Their products have received accolades and awards including nominations for the Designs of the Year by London’s Design Museum, and Space.com’s Space Age Award.
  
  He is currently a Professor of product systems and production processes at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design.

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  Ian Ferguson

  Founder, PostlerFerguson

  2017 Consumer Product Jury Captain

  Ian Ferguson (born USA 1977) studied Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received a B.Science in Architectural Design in 2000. In 2007, he received his MA Design Products at the Royal College of Art.
  
  Along with Martin Postler, he is a founder and director of PostlerFerguson, an industrial design office creating products for a meaningful future. PostlerFerguson works with clients to design and develop products combining bold creative vision with refined technical solutions.
  
  In 2011, he also co-founded PostlerFerguson’s sister company in Hong Kong, Papafoxtrot, a lifestyle and wood toy company. They produce a range of wood toys based on modern industrial marvels and the Staeckler shoe display systems. Their products have received accolades and awards including nominations for the Designs of the Year by London’s Design Museum, and Space.com’s Space Age Award.
  
  He has worked extensively as an architect, for firms including Testa + Weiser (Los Angeles), Hideto Horiike + Urtopia (Tokyo), and Ove Arup (London). He has taught architecture and design at the Southern California Institute of Architects, University of California Los Angeles, Aarhus University and the Istituto Europeo di Design, and co-directed the first year architecture course at London Metropolitan University, and ran Platform 17 in the Royal College of Arts Design Products department from 2011 - 2015.

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  Stuart Harvey Lee

  Founder, Prime Studio

  2023 Commercial Equipment Jury Captain

  Stuart Harvey Lee is the Founder of Prime Studio, a Product + Brand design consultancy based in NYC. He started his career as a Mechanical Engineer working in a steelworks before discovering his passion for Industrial Design whilst earning his Masters Degree at the Royal College of Art.
  
  He moved to New York in 1991 and cut his teeth working at both Smart Design and Able Design before founding Prime Studio in 1998. At Prime, Stuart is fortunate to work with a wide range of clients from global companies like Unilever and Bayer to startups like Harry’s and Welly. Most importantly he relishes designing products which make a meaningful difference to people’s lives.
  
  When he’s not designing Stuart can either be found challenging himself to ride the hills of the Hudson Valley on his favorite bike or desperately trying to cultivate his asparagus bed.

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  Joshua Taylor

  CEO, Product EVO

  2023 Commercial Equipment Jury Member

  Josh Taylor is the CEO of Product EVO, a surfer dude, and a secret weapon for overwhelmed founders and product managers. He believes passion without good strategy is wasted energy. So he's on a mission to make successful products predictable and repeatable. His approach is to align the product development process with first principles for demand generation.
  
  Through Product EVO, Josh has helped develop hundreds of products and solved countless product development challenges along the way. He's created a curriculum for lean market research and product strategy for high-growth companies with limited time and resources.
  
  Outside of Product EVO, Josh is a landlocked surfer. He moves abroad with his family in the summers to chase waves during the big wave season in Central America. He is always looking for ways to expand his thinking about what is possible for his life and take massive action to live that way.
  

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  Emily Pilloton

  Founder, Project H

  2016 Design for Social Impact Jury Captain

  Emily Pilloton is the founder of the nonprofit Project H Design. Since 2008, she has run Project H and worked with young people ages 9-18 to bring the power of design and building to schools and communities. Emily is trained as an architect with degrees from UC Berkeley and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but found that she is physically incapable of working in an office or for a boss and much prefers the creative chaos of a public school classroom filled with tools and welding equipment. Project H Design was born out of the hope that authentic, on-the-ground, face-to-face work with young people could transform what it means to be a design professional, what it means to learn in the 21st century, and what it means to get dirty and physically build solutions for your community.
  
  Specifically, Emily launched 2 Project H programs: Studio H, an in-school design/build curriculum, and Camp H, an after-school and summer building camp for young girls ages 9-13. Exploring the intersection of science, art, math, and community development, Emily has led Project H youth in the design and construction of an award-winning 2,000-square-foot farmers market structure, chicken coops, playgrounds, their own school library, microhomes for the homeless, laser-etched skateboards, and welded steel public sculpture.
  
  Emily believes that by giving youth, particularly girls and students of color, the skills to design and build their wildest ideas, we can support the next generation of creative, confident changemakers. Her ideas and work have made their way to the TED Stage, The Colbert Report, the New York Times, and more. Her work is the subject of the full-length documentary If You Build It. She is the author of two books, Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People, and Tell Them I Built This: Transforming Schools, Communities, and Lives with Design-Based Education. Emily is also a Visiting Professor in the Department of Design at UC Davis.

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  Somchana Kangwarnjit

  Founder, Prompt Design

  2016 Packaging Jury Captain

  Somchana Kangwarnjit graduated from King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang with a degree in industrial design.
  In 2009, he founded Prompt Design, helping his clients to build brands and businesses by delivering new experiences in strategies and design executions. Prompt Design’s clients include Nestlé, CP, Singha Corp, Lotte, Glico, FrieslandCampina, Cargill, Boots, etc.
  
  He is regularly invited to be a committee or jury member for design competitions and often serves as a guest columnist and professor for many publishers and top universities.
  
  Somchana has won several awards :
  Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze Pentawards, Asian Young Designer of the Year from Designnet, The Dieline Awards, IF Design Award, Red dot, Fab Awards, Communicator Awards, ASIA Star Packaging Award.

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  Monika Bielskyte

  Futures Researcher/Futurist Designer, PROTOPIA

  2020 Speculative Design Jury Member

  As the Founder of Protopia Futures, Monika Bielskyte is the architect of a platform and a community to proactively prototype inspiring and actually livable future visions. Her journey as a nomadic explorer in over 100 countries has given her first-person experience of the interconnectedness between human cultural priorities and the unfolding future.
  
  Monika was born in the Soviet Union, and grew up in the newly liberated Lithuania, before leaving the country at age 17. Her perspectives as a futurist have been shaped by the collapse of the physical boundaries of a totalitarian regime, and the opening up of the digital world – its opportunities and its harms. She currently resides in Johannesburg, South Africa – which gives her deeper insights into broader futures perspectives, beyond the imaginations of the Global North.
  
  Monika started her career as a creative – working on movie sets in her late teens and progressively moving towards the bleeding edge of technological innovation and scientific research by her mid-20s. Her multicultural and multidisciplinary background, as well as an uncompromising focus on the intricate relationship between future fictions and real-life, have guided her on a journey that makes her voice clearly distinct in today’s foresight industry.
  
  Monika has worked not only with established global media, tech and lifestyle companies such as Universal, Google, Nike, BBC and the WEF, but also various governments and cities. Her contributions have resonated across both industry corridors and academia, from The Royal
  Society to CERN.

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  Hannah Lueptow

  Design Researcher & Strategist, Questtono

  2019 Transportation Jury Member

  Hannah June Lueptow is a design researcher and strategist at Questtono in Brooklyn, New York. She utilizes in-depth user engagement to solve experience based design challenges across a wide spectrum of product categories. Excited about understanding people’s relationship with the products around them, Hannah works to develop empathetic user experiences in disruptive tech spaces. Hannah has conducted international research projects in India, China and Indonesia and has worked with companies such as LG, Ford, Anheuser-Busch InBev, leading mixed reality companies, and more. In her spare time, Hannah designs and slipcasts functional objects out of her Brooklyn-based ceramic studio.

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  Babitha George

  Partner, Quicksand

  2015 Design for Social Impact Jury Member

  Babitha George is a Partner at Quicksand and leads multiple innovation projects within Quicksand. Her prior work in education in India prompted her to actively think about the role of design thinking in social impact contexts, leading her to steer several of Quicksand's social innovation projects, especially in the use of technology in education and vocational training contexts, to improve learning outcomes and create more engaging & transformational learning environments. She is a management graduate from IIM Ahmedabad, prior to which she studied English, Journalism & Psychology and with this background, Babitha believes strongly in the strength of multi-disciplinary approaches. Her core skills are in design strategy and research as it pertains to conceptualizing products and services that promote sustainability and quality of life, especially for low income communities.Babitha is one of the co-founders of the UnBox Festival. She is also on the Advisory Board of the Victor Papanek Foundation and was recently featured in the British Council's 'Blurring the Lines' exhibition in London, as one of sixteen people from around the world who are reinventing creative exploration and participation in their respective communities.

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  David Harvey

  Wine Importer, Raeburn Fine Wines

  2015 Furniture & Lighting Jury Member

  David Harvey is a wine importer with Raeburn Fine Wines, and a writer. He works with elite nature-centric wine producers of West Europe, and gets involved with closures, packaging, marketing, buying and sales. He contributes to The World of Fine Wine, the award winning publication, and has recently written an entry for The Oxford Companion to Wine (2015 edition).
  He judged at the IWC (International Wine Challenge), the world'd largest wine competition, from 2002-2004 as panel head and super-juror.
  In 2004, while working for Frank Cornelissen on Mt. Etna, he created the name 'orange wine' for the renaissance of white grapes processed like red grapes in the cellar, which has since stuck and become the international standard.
  His favourite objects include his black Parker 51s, prototypes of Paul Cocksedge's Bookmark and Ideas Tray, a Cannondale Killer V and Klein Attitude, a Herve Pennequin corkscrew by Le Thiers, a Santoku knife by Sakai Takayuki. Etc.
  David studied writing at Harvard Summer School, wine at the WSET, and photography at Filton College.

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  Youjin Nam

  Designer & Thinker, Reality Labs - Meta

  2024 Consumer Technology Jury Member

  My professional experience is a melting pot across multiple continents, agency to in-house, vision to execution, and design to business.
  
  Always asking "why", I believe good designers strive to understand basic human needs. Like culture, I believe good design is basic fabric of human life.

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  Youjin Nam

  Designer & Thinker, Reality Labs - Meta

  2024 A/V & Photography Equipment Jury Member

  My professional experience is a melting pot across multiple continents, agency to in-house, vision to execution, and design to business.
  
  Always asking "why", I believe good designers strive to understand basic human needs. Like culture, I believe good design is basic fabric of human life.

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  Hanna Nova Beatrice

  Editor in Chief, Residence Magazine

  2016 Furniture & Lighting Jury Member

  Hanna Nova Beatrice is a design writer and Editor in Chief of Swedish title Residence and English language bookazine My Residence. She has been the Editor of a number of magazines, all focusing on design and interiors, as well as edited and written books on design, including the book Behind the Scenes in the Design industry. She regularly holds panel debates on design and have co-curated exhibitions such as 20 Designers at Biologiska (Stockholm 2011) and Norweigan Structure (Milan 2016).

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  Stacy La

  Design Consultant, Resolve to Save Lives

  2019 Service Design Jury Member

  Stacy was previously the Director of Design at Clover Health, where she led the design team's vision, strategy, and direction. As an early employee, she helped scale the company from 4 employees to 500+ in 4 years. Prior to Clover, she was a Design Lead at Yammer (acquired by Microsoft) and has designed for Fortune 500 companies including Facebook, Google, and Intuit.
  She is currently consulting at Resolve to Save Lives, a global health initiative based in New York.