Jury Alumni

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  Boriana Viljoen

  Senior Interaction Designer, Fitbit

  2022 Health & Wellness Jury Member

  Boriana Viljoen is a hybrid UX/service designer with extensive experience in the wellness and health tech industry. Boriana utilizes a human-centered design approach to create experiences that aim to improve people’s lives. Based in San Francisco, CA, Boriana has a passion for displaying complex information in easy to grasp ways, simplifying complicated user interactions, and making digital products intuitive and appealing.

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  Nichole Rouillac

  Founder + Creative Director, level

  2022 Home & Living Jury Captain

  Nichole is Founder and Creative Director of level, a West Coast, women-led industrial design shop based in San Francisco. The level studio is on a mission to create a global positive and progressive influence through smart, thoughtful design.
  
  Nichole’s work at level has helped create new industry categories and propelled products into the global spotlight. The studio’s portfolio encompasses the likes of Microsoft, Google, Logitech, FitBit, North, HTC, AliveCor, Tempo and Nex.
  
  level’s work has garnered wide recognition, including design awards such as FastCo., IDEA, Red Dot, iF and Spark. Notably, level was recognized as #03 in FastCompany’s Most Innovative Design Companies of 2021.
  
  Nichole remains committed to creating a diverse, inclusive industry. She has dedicated her career to balancing motherhood and empowering the next generation of female designers through mentorship, having served as chair of IDSA’s Women in Design from 2017-2021. level are active members of the Diversity in Design (DID) Collaborative, initiated in June 2021 to foster systemic change by increasing diversity and improving conditions for Black creatives across the design industry.

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  Alexis Brunkow

  Architecture & Design Manager, Knoll

  2022 Home & Living Jury Member

  For more than 17 years, Alexis has held a multitude of roles within the design and architecture industry, spanning editorial writing for a home and garden publication, marketing, consulting and client relations. Currently, Alexis serves as Senior Manager at the Diversity in Design (DID) Collaborative, which was initiated in 2021 to foster systemic change by increasing diversity and improving conditions for Black creatives across the design industry. DID is a group of companies united by a common belief in the critical role that diversity plays in creating strong, impactful businesses and innovations in the design world and beyond. Alexis lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two dogs, and is passionate about sustainability, supporting local businesses, and empowering youth.

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  Nicola Ralston

  VP, Global Innovation Studios, Dell Technologies

  2022 Home & Living Jury Member

  Nicola is an accomplished Designer and Design leader with extensive experience building and leading design & innovation teams for global brands. 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 way of connecting people. For Microsoft Windows and Devices group Nicola built and led a multi-disciplinary, human centered, design team across Design and Human Factors that worked to articulate disruptions, product, and experience opportunities with a focus on edge devices, and looking to ambient futures. Most recently, Nicola has joined Dell Technologies as VP, Global Innovation Studios, responsible for leading the Experience Innovation Studio teams that envision, define, and build differentiated customer experiences and proof of concepts, driving innovation and disruption across Dell’s business units and product portfolios. Nicola has worked and lived as a designer in the UK, Italy, Germany, Finland, and the US.

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  Hector Silva

  Executive Director, Advanced Design

  2022 Home & Living Jury Member

  Hector Silva brings over 7 years of teaching experience at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Notre Dame, the Academy of Art University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Rochester Institute of Technology at their nationally-acclaimed industrial design programs. Recognized for his contributions in academia, Hector was awarded the Young Educator of the Year by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA). An active professional in the field, Hector works as an industrial design contractor through his own studio, H Design, partnering with Crate & Barrel, DesignLab, Nickelodeon, LeapFrog, Foster Grant, Insight Product Development, Lund & Company Invention, as well as various entrepreneurs. Hector is also the founder of the design nonprofit, Advanced Design (AD), an organization awarded the Special Achievement Award by the IDSA for making design education more accessible and through disrupting the mediums through which design education has been traditionally offered. AD continues to grow today, connecting students and working professionals to foster a community of design excellence. Most recently, Hector founded Offsite, a 12 week pilot program catered towards furthering design education outside of traditional academia space. This program was developed to translate the needs of the industry into course content taught by design industry leaders. The goal is to help students develop the right skill set and mentorship to thrive on the job and support them along the way.

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  Joy Young

  Creative Director, Astro Studios

  2022 Home & Living Jury Member

  Joy is a Creative Director at Astro Studios, a brand and industrial design studio based in San Francisco. As a designer, she focuses on crafting compelling stories and experiences that are tailored for brands and people. She works with the team at Astro Studios to build products that bring meaningful and positive experiences to everyday life. Spending much of her upbringing in both Taiwan and New Zealand has given Joy a unique cultural background from which to draw inspiration. Joy has over 14 years of professional experience as an Industrial Designer working in agencies in Asia, Europe and North America. She has worked on a diverse range of categories ranging from homeware, furniture, consumer electronics, health & wellness and medical.

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  Raquel Breternitz

  Design Leader and Strategist

  2022 Interaction Jury Captain

  Raquel Breternitz is an award-winning design leader + strategist with a resume spanning service with the USCIS and as Elizabeth Warren’s Design Director to private sector credits at the New York Times, Pivotal Labs, and IBM. She has also spoken at Lesbians Who Tech, PluralSightLIVE, Wonder Women in Tech, and O'Reilly Design.
  
  Raquel’s work and speaking topics are connected by a passion for accessibility and inclusion, research-driven design thinking, and a hunger for tackling complex and challenging problems. She believes in strong, empathetic leadership for empowered, creative design teams. Outside of her day job, she loves to write, illustrate, make comics, and take pictures of her cat.

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  Romello Goodman

  Computational Designer and Educator

  2022 Interaction Jury Member

  Romello is a Computational Designer located in Washington DC. He believes that computers can make us more creative and that tool building can be a labor of love. In the past, he’s worked with software in various industries from media to aerospace and politics. Currently, he works on the Polaris team at Shopify and teaches in the Graphic Design department at MICA.

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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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  Ryan Swedenborg

  Artist and Designer, Spotify

  2022 Interaction Jury Member

  Ryan Swedenborg is an artist and designer based out of NYC, where she currently works for Spotify. Her work takes the form of visual identities, applications, apparel, reports, celebrations, prints, sculptures, and paintings. Being a WNBA fan, collecting Reba merch, and wandering around New York are her hobbies.

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  Drue Thomas

  Product Designer, Netflix

  2022 Interaction Jury Member

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  Ruihai Youngblood

  Senior Product Designer, Flatiron Health

  2022 Interaction Jury Member

  Ruihai is a product designer who loves teaching organizations and individuals how to do user-centered design well. He has worked with organizations in healthcare, government, ecommerce, and esports to implement regular user research, accessibility practices, and lean UX. Ruihai trained the first product designers at Ford UK, the FAA, and the US Air Force. He's currently helping teams deliver cancer research data faster.
  
  Outside of work, Ruihai fosters cats, skates, translates video games, and collects vintage Carhartt.

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  Desirée Zamora García

  Product Design Manager, Webflow

  2022 Interaction Jury Member

  Desirée is a designer, speaker, and editor whose practice has spanned a diverse range of spaces in interaction design. She is driven by a desire to push the boundaries of interaction design in service of creative expression, and giving people agency over their own presence and opportunities on the web.
  
  Today she leads teams of product designers at Webflow, a no-code website publishing platform. Her editorial work enables designers to influence discussions about web technologies, standards, and frameworks. In 2013, her design of personal finance tools for funding a college education were the runner-up for the Core77 award in government. She also works as an editor at A List Apart

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  Kim Bates

  Chief Marketing Officer & Chief Futurist, LRXD

  2022 Packaging Jury Captain

  Kim is a marketing, communications, and innovation executive with 20+ years of experience driving profitable revenue growth, leading marketing and strategy departments on both the client and agency sides. As the CMO of Common Good, she led the creative agency’s brand, growth, thought leadership, and reputation initiatives. Kim was also the Chief Futurist at Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve, a think tank with over 90% accuracy on predicting the future.
  
  As the leader of The FutureFactor Lab at Common Good, she worked with fortune 200 enterprises and start-ups to help predict, navigate and leverage the future to generate meaningful business transformation, creative innovation, incremental revenue and share growth initiatives.

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  Gail Anderson

  Chair of BFA Design and Advertising, School of Visual Arts

  2022 Packaging Jury Member

  Gail Anderson is an NYC-based designer, educator, and writer. She is Chair of BFA Design and BFA Advertising at the School of Visual Arts and the Creative Director at Visual Arts Press. Anderson has served as senior art director at Rolling Stone, creative director of design at SpotCo, and as a designer at The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine and Vintage Books. She has taught at SVA for thirty years and has coauthored 15 books on design, typography, and illustration with the fabulous Steven Heller. Anderson serves on the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee for the US Postal Service and the advisory boards of Poster House and The One Club for Creativity. She is an AIGA Medalist and the 2018 recipient of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Lifetime Achievement Award for Design. Her work is represented in the Library of Congress’s permanent collections, the Milton Glaser Design Archives, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

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  Jenna Capobianco

  Executive Creative Director, LRXD

  2022 Packaging Jury Member