Jury Alumni

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  Jordan Shade

  Design Program Lead for Offerings, IBM Consulting

  2022 Interaction Jury Member

  Jordan Shade is a designer, researcher and leader with a bent towards a business context. She has led work in enterprise design thinking, online learning, community building, the art of facilitation, transforming organizations, engaging experiences for local government, and creating insight-led strategy. She lives in Austin, TX and currently works for IBM. Her other projects include founding the group A Functional Democracy and its calling card 'zine: A Beginner's Guide to Local Government, as well as the art collective and podcast The City Says So with partner Hal Wuertz.

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  Arianna Orland

  Co-founder, Creative Director and Experience Designer, In/Visible Talks

  2021 Interaction Jury Member

  Arianna is a seasoned creative leader, community builder, and holistic thinker fluent in product, brand, and marketing with a deeply held passion for the craft of design. With over 20 years of industry experience, Arianna draws from an enormous quiver of design processes and techniques to galvanize teams and projects to success. Currently, Arianna's impressive client roster includes Twitter, Instacart, and Lyft.
  
  Arianna is the co-founder of In/Visible Talks, a conference for creative professionals that celebrates the art of design. Now in its 5th year, In/Visible Talks has hosted 50+ speakers on the topic of creativity from all over the world. She proudly serves as Board President of Creativity Explored, a San Francisco based nonprofit that gives artists with developmental disabilities the means to create and share their work. Arianna also frequently writes on the subject of creativity and her work has been featured in prestigious publications such as Co.Design, 99u, and Forbes.

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  August Heffner

  Creative Director, Instrument

  2021 Interaction Jury Captain

  August is a designer and creative director. He works to bridge the divide between the functionality of digital products and the emotion of brand marketing. He began by leading internal design teams at MoMA, J. Crew, Kate Spade, & Casper. He’s been a regular contributor of editorial illustrations to The New York Times and an instructor at Parsons and SVA. August transitioned to digital product design and began leading project teams for Huge, and Work&Co. Today, August leads a team at Instrument where he creates digital first brands, marketing, and products for organizations including Twitter, PATH and the WNBA.

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  Stephanie Aaron

  Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase

  2024 Interaction Jury Captain

  Stephanie Aaron is a design lead at J.P. Morgan Chase where she focuses on making things simpler for employees and customers every day. She has previously worked at quite a few large financial firms and the New York Federal Reserve. She ran her own design firm for more than a decade, with clients including The American Museum of Natural History, Citibank and Barnes & Noble.
  Outside of work she is North America regional coordinator for IxDA.
  A native New Yorker, she holds a BFA from the Cooper Union and an MFA in Interaction Design from the School of Visual Arts. In her free time she can be found with her nose in a book and a 62-pound pit bull on her lap or in a kayak on the Hudson River.

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  Meghan Romero

  UX Design Lead, JP Morgan Chase

  2024 Interaction Jury Member

  Meghan is a UX Design Lead at JP Morgan Chase, where she uses service design and collaborative design techniques to improve customer and employee experience. Prior to Chase, she designed new products in the healthcare industry to support nurses and patients and also worked in K-12 and higher education in a number of roles. Meghan lives in northern Delaware with her husband and enjoys Saturday morning yard sales, travel, margaritas, and talking about whatever tv shows she has been watching recently.

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  Carla Echevarria

  Vice President and Head of Creative, MakerBot

  2015 Interaction Jury Member

  Carla Echevarria is an award-winning creative director with a design background and a decade of experience in digital product development and advertising.She leads the creative team at MakerBot, overseeing user experience design, visual design and copywriting. Her team is responsible for how users experience MakerBot across all channels: brand identity, website and digital properties, online and print advertising, social media, events, promotions, packaging design, print collateral, MakerBot Retail Stores, and third-party retail. Before joining MakerBot, Carla led creative teams at the Facebook Creative Shop, Google Creative Lab and R/GA.She is also on the faculty of the undergraduate Graphic Design and Advertising department of the School of Visual Arts.Her work has won awards at the Cannes Lions, One Show, D&AD, Art Director's Club and the Webbys, and has been published in the AIGA Design 365, Creativity Review, Creativity Magazine and Communication Arts. She has spoken at various industry events, including SXSW Interactive, AIGA events and the FindSpark Creative Conference. She also serves on the board of directors for the New York chapter of the AIGA.

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  Jess Greco

  Director, Product Experience Design, Mastercard

  2024 Interaction Jury Member

  Jess Greco is an experience design and research leader with deep experience in tying customer insights into business priorities that drive design-led organizational change. She has a proven track record in creating an environment that fosters team collaboration and builds design maturity. Her experience is a mix of consumer and enterprise work across industries including financial services, payments, insurance, consulting, healthcare, education and media.

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  Sara Gooch

  UX Design & Research Leadership Consultant, Measured Studios

  2020 Interaction Jury Member

  A design leader focused on health care, food, conservation, social impact and education, Sara believes design can help us shift our behaviors for good. She leads design challenges with empathy and a systems-based approach.
  
  Sara has spent over two decades designing for clients such as Kaiser Permanente, National Head Start Association, Ford Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund and Disney. In her early career, she led the design of a content management system for nonprofits and foundations. She's been part of leadership teams at Big Tomorrow, frog and most recently OpenTable, overseeing a team of 30+ researchers, writers, product and brand designers.

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  Drue Thomas

  Product Designer, Netflix

  2022 Interaction Jury Member

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  Kim Bost

  Product Design Manager, XD Leadership Team, Netflix

  2023 Interaction Jury Member

  Kim is a seasoned design leader and has worked at companies like The New York Times, Etsy, and Dropbox. She brings a unique blend of passion and strategic thinking to create industry-defining experiences. As part of the XD leadership team at Netflix, she collaborates with a stunning team of designers to entertain the world.
  

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  Alex Rainert

  VP of Product, Nucleus

  2016 Interaction Jury Member

  I've got 17 years of experience building teams and shipping products in wildly different creative and business environments - startups (co-founder @dodgeball, head of product @Foursquare), large tech companies (Google), digital agencies (R/GA, Razorfish) and an amazing tech-meets-art graduate program (NYU’s ITP).
  
  I'm currently leading Product at a NYC-based hardware + software company called Nucleus. We're building a smart intercom that will serve as the foundation for people to communicate seamlessly with the ones they care about the most — whether they’re in another room in the same house, in a completely different location (Hi mom!) or on the move on their mobile devices.
  
  You can learn more about the product at www.nucleuslife.com. I'm building up the product team so if you have any interest in designing an experience that will live at the center of families' lives, get in touch and let me know what excites you about it.
  

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  Alexis Lloyd

  Creative Director, NY Times R&D Lab

  2016 Interaction Jury Captain

  Alexis Lloyd is the Creative Director of The New York Times Research & Development Lab, where she investigates emerging technologies and prototypes future concepts for news and media. Her work is focused on creating immersive and exploratory experiences through innovative physical-to-digital interactions, data visualization and screen-based interfaces.
  
  Before joining The New York Times Company in 2007, Ms. Lloyd designed award-winning projects for Columbia University, FOX, American Express, The New York Historical Society and PBS, among others. Additionally, her media artwork has been shown at international venues such as the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, SIGGRAPH, the Chelsea Art Museum and Symphony Space.
  
  Ms. Lloyd received her Bachelor of Arts from Vassar College and holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons The New School for Design.

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  Jenifer Bulcock

  Founder/Owner, Peoplemade LLC

  2024 Interaction Jury Member

  Jeni is an experience design strategist based in New York City. Born and raised in Australia, she established a design business at the age of 24, which thrived in Australia and Canada before she embarked on a new journey in New York City a decade ago.
  
  Driven by a keen interest in strategic decision-making, Jeni transitioned into design and research roles within consultancy and in-house settings. Her experience encompasses both Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX), where she has spearheaded strategic design initiatives and digital transformation programs across various industries. Her portfolio boasts an array of national and global brands, including Samsung, Meta, Square, IKEA, AIG, Better.com, and KraftHeinz, among others.
  
  In January 2023, fueled by her entrepreneurial spirit, she founded Peoplemade LLC, a Service Design and UX Research consultancy.
  
  Outside of work, Jeni finds joy in taking her dog on long walks and hosting dinner parties featuring seasonal produce sourced from farmers' markets.

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  Woojin Lee

  Senior Art Director, SapientRazorfish

  2017 Interaction Jury Member

  If Woojin Lee were not a designer she would be a private detective.
  
  She currently works as a Senior Art Director at SapientRazorfish, in New York. She has worked on some great projects, Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Dove, JPMorgan, Credit Suisse and other fast pace pitches, that have utilized new technological trends such as apps, responsive platforms, touch screen, and social media. The sophisticated nature of these experiences along with her previous experience founding her own design boutique in Seoul have drawn her toward projects that focus on an entire and integrated brand experience.
  
  She has been named as the recipient The Red dot award, The Creativity Media & Interactive Awards, and The Creativity International Awards. Also her first responsive design project for Mercedes-Benz was selected as a 2015 Webby Awards Honoree in the Websites Best Practice category.
  
  She was a foreign correspondent the Korean design and culture publication, G colon. Her first book, 2587 days: A Record of Creative Encounters in New York, was published in 2014 in Korea and describes her experiences living, studying, and working in New York. Woojin has also taught as an adjunct faculty for FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology).
  
  Woojin received her BFA degree in Crafts from Kookmin University (Seoul) and her MS in Communications Design from Pratt Institute (New York).

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  Eric Grant

  Creative Director, SapientRazorfish

  2017 Interaction Jury Captain

  As Creative Director for the SapientRazorfish Emerging Experiences group, Eric manages and inspires global teams that create groundbreaking, interactive experiences that live on screens, in physical spaces and among virtual worlds. Working with clients like Mercedes-Benz, Adobe, and T-Mobile, Eric's work focuses on compelling storytelling moments that create memorable and dynamic experiences.
  
  Prior to SapientRazorfish, Eric was Director of Brand Experience for Hot Studio in San Francisco before moving to New York to open its SoHo office. Eventually acquired by Facebook, Hot's user-centered design approach created a multitude of collaborative relationships with clients like Google, Gilt Groupe, eBay and Ancestry.com.
  
  Eric's work has earned him two ADDYs and Webby Honorees, and has appeared in Communication Arts, AIGA's annual Year in Design, PRINT Magazine and HOW Magazine. Before design, he studied public policy and worked in various levels of government and for several campaigns and political organizations.

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  Kelsey Snook

  Creative Director, Second Story

  2017 Interaction Jury Member

  Kelsey Snook is Creative Director at Second Story experiential design studios. For over 15 years Kelsey has been creating participatory environments where people can connect. She has worked internationally, creating projects that span product, furniture, exhibition and large scale public interactive environments - as artistic pieces and for clients in cultural, commercial and public sectors. Kelsey holds an MA with distinction in Creative Practice for Narrative Environments from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, and a BA in Industrial Design from the Rhode Island School of Design.