Jury Alumni

• 

  Bryce Rutter

  Head of Consulting Services | UX, HF, ID, Noble Aptar Pharma

  2024 Health & Wellness Jury Member

  Dr. Rutter is Head of Consulting Services for Nobel, and Aptar Pharma company. He is a worldwide expert in the research, ergonomics and design of handheld medical devices, products, and packaging. Aptar acquired Metaphase, a design consultancy specializing in research, human factors, and industrial design founded by Dr. Rutter in 1991. His leadership and vision has consistently delivered award-winning, innovative breakthrough designs for several of the world’s most prestigious and influential Fortune 500 brands having earned 120+ Global Design Excellence Awards, 115+ patents, 2 products included the Museum of Modern Art, several designs in the Chicago Athenaeum’s Good Design Museum Collection, 2 Edison Innovation Awards, and a Design of the Decade Award. Dr. Rutter has been profiled, an invited guest, and interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, CNN, CTV, IdeaCity, CityTV, The Chicago Tribune, The Ottawa Citizen, The Globe & Mail and Business 2.0. Dr Rutter holds a Bachelor of Industrial Design from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and a Master Degree in Industrial Design and Ph.D. in Kinesiology, specializing in motor hand function, both from the University of Illinois.

• 

  Julianna Schneider

  Usability & Human Factors Engineer, Bausch + Lomb

  2024 Health & Wellness Jury Member

  Julianna Schneider is the lead Usability & Human Factors Engineer for the Bausch + Lomb Surgical product lines. She is an innovative engineer who is committed to developing intuitive, useful products for users. Having the ability to resonate with users, she prioritizes simplistic and meaningful designs. She leverages human centered design elements partnered with a risk based approach to ensure interfaces are optimized for users’ applications, and ultimately safe and effective for use. Harnessing her previous experience as a mechanical engineer, she frequently assesses design-related and use-related failures prior to product launch and creates solutions to mitigate these failures. Similarly, she understands the value input from multiple functionalities has and works cross functionally to ensure input is captured and incorporated into designs. She enjoys learning new things, meeting new people, and embracing challenges because they all bring growth - both personally and professionally.

• 

  Daniela Macías

  Global Industrial Design Manager, Colgate-Palmolive

  2024 Home & Living Jury Captain

  A proud native and longtime resident of Mexico City, Daniela Macías is an NYC-based global industrial design manager with 15 years of experience, leading the creation of global household and consumer products for Colgate-Palmolive. In her current role as an Industrial Design Manager, she is responsible for the design leadership of expert cross-functional teams working on packaging structures and brand experiences for Personal Care, Pet Nutrition, and Home Care brands that hundreds of millions of people around the world love and use daily.
  Throughout her career, she has overseen the design process of bottles, caps, bar soaps, dispensers, soluble pods, and new experiences across a variety of users, categories, brands, packaging formats, scopes, and markets. Her professional journey—starting at one of Colgate’s manufacturing facilities, moving up to regional corporate offices in Mexico City, and elevated to a cross-category industrial design development role at Colgate-Palmolive’s global headquarters in NYC—has forged her as a resilient industrial designer with deep empathy for both the business side and the people she designs for.

• 

  Divya Chaurasia

  Sr. Industrial Designer and UX Lead, Spitfire Industry

  2024 Home & Living Jury Member

  Divya Chaurasia is an award-winning industrial designer, with a background in engineering. An expert in user-centered research, sustainable practices and design for manufacturing, she has a Masters in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute, New York and Bachelor’s in Technology from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India.
  
  Currently, Divya works as a senior industrial designer and user experience lead at Spitfire Industry, a design consultancy based in Brooklyn, New York. She designs products and experiences for brands like Clorox, All Clad, Tefal, Bausch & Lomb, Cook’s Direct, Hunter Douglas, GoTrax, and Nectar. Divya’s work is inspired by the everyday pursuits of people. She is fascinated by the connection between humans, objects and environments, and captures this relationship in delightfully functional products. Her work has been exhibited at NYCxDesign and NYC Media Lab Annual Summit and received recognition by Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award and International Design Awards.

• 

  Pinar Guvenc

  Partner, SOUR

  2024 Home & Living Jury Member

  Pinar Guvenc is a partner of SOUR, an international, award-winning hybrid design studio with the mission to address social and urban problems through sustainable, adaptive, and inclusive methodologies. They are doing so by active end-user involvement and co-creation sessions throughout the design process. In addition to managing the business operations, Pinar also leads strategic planning, design research, and partnerships of the studio.
  Pinar is also part-time faculty at Parsons School of Design, School of Design Strategies, and serves on the Board of Directors of Open Style Lab, a nonprofit organization initiated at MIT, with the purpose of making style accessible to people of all abilities. She created and teaches a strategic collaborations workshop series for the Pratt Center for Community Development and the Made in NYC initiative. She is also the author and instructor of the Inclusive Design class for the School of Visual Arts MFA Interaction Design, which is the first multidisciplinary inclusive design graduate course in the United States.
  Pinar is a frequent public speaker and a guest lecturer and hosts the panels and podcasts of What's Wrong With, a series of discussions and podcasts with progress makers and experts to diagnose real problems, ideate solutions, and raise awareness to the general public.
  Pinar has a BSc in Industrial Engineering and MSc in Economics & Finance.

• 

  James Pryor

  Creative Director, Touch

  2024 Home & Living Jury Member

  James Pryor is the co-founder and creative director of Touch, an agency that stands at the forefront of sustainable innovation in packaging and product design. His agency collaborates with renowned FMCG brands like Mondelez, PepsiCo, Colgate Palmolive and Nestle, pioneering future-proof solutions for brand growth. James leads Touch's design and innovation team, managing everything from conceptual exploration to design for manufacture. He frequently liaises with clients, presenting Touch's latest works and proposals.
  Under James's guidance, Touch has achieved significant milestones, including the award-winning Carlsberg Export redesign and the creation of Häagen-Dazs' Loop reusable packaging system. His commitment to sustainability has led to the elimination of thousands of tonnes of packaging waste and enhanced the recyclability and reusability of numerous products. James's innovative contributions are also evidenced by his numerous patents for major clients.
  A passionate advocate for sustainable design, James is a regular speaker at global industry events and has contributed to the European Packaging Design Agency Boost Book. He holds a master’s in consumer product design from Coventry University and has a rich background in design and innovation, having worked with agencies like Impact, 1HQ and 3T.
  Beyond his professional life, James enjoys travel, movies, reading, and photography. He is also an avid guitarist and musician. His greatest joy comes from spending time in the High Wycombe with his wife, Rachel, and their two children, Madeline and Michael.

• 

  Joo Young Lim

  Industrial Designer, Vanderbilt Home

  2024 Home & Living Jury Member

  Joo Young Lim is an Industrial Designer at Vanderbilt Home, a lifestyle product manufacturing firm based in New York City. As a designer, Joo Young specializes in studying people’s shifting lifestyles and using the findings to create useful designs for their various aspects of living, especially in cooking and entertaining. Joo Young draws inspiration from his experiences of multi-national upbringing and a deep interest in the history of home entertaining. He has over a decade of experience working in various categories, including food prep, tabletop, decor, organization, and pets.
  Joo Young earned a BFA in Industrial Design from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2010. Since then, he has held design director roles at Martha Stewart Living and Barkbox and a co-founder role at Gruppo Atelier Home.

• 

  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.

• 

  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.

• 

  Alex Wilcox Cheek

  Design Manager, Google

  2024 Interaction Jury Member

  Alex Wilcox Cheek is a New York-based designer. For more than ten years, he taught in the School of Design, College of Humanities & Social Sciences, and Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon. His courses blended design, architecture, technology, and the humanities, reecting his cross-disciplinary approach to his practice. In that time, he spun o a number of start-ups including Classroom Salon, Macromicro, and Skale. Alex has long been involved with the Interaction Design Association, co- founding the rst chapter in the Middle East, IxDA Doha, and later serving as local leader for New York City. Today, he leads a design team at Google.

• 

  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.

• 

  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.

• 

  Scott Henderson

  Principal, Scott Henderson, Inc.

  2024 Lifestyle Accessories Jury Captain

  Scott Henderson is an American designer, artist, writer, and curator from New York City where he has risen to the pinnacle of his profession as one of the world’s leading industrial designers.
  
  Scott has designed iconic, best-selling products for companies including OXO, Microsoft, Krups, Intel, Skip Hop and Alessi, and over fifteen of Scott’s products have been best sellers at the Museum of Modern Art's MoMA Design Store. Scott believes that the goal of good design is meet the mind of the user with unimpeded flow.
  
  Scott has spoken about design throughout the world; he has won over fifty international design awards including a 2023 Red Dot Award, he has represented the United States as their Design Ambassador, he has chaired the International Design Conference, and his work is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Museum and the Alessi Museum.

• 

  Joe Doucet

  Founder, Joe Doucet x Partners

  2024 Lifestyle Accessories Jury Member

  A designer, entrepreneur, inventor and creative director, Joe Doucet is one of the most sought-after creative talents working in America today. After graduating from the Art Center College of Design, Doucet quickly began exporting his vision into product, furniture, environment, and technology to find solutions for daily and societal challenges through design. His work deftly hybridizes function and visual appeal while conveying layers of meaning and message. Doucet believes that design and, more importantly, a designer’s thought process can play a larger role in innovation and problem solving, as well as aesthetics. He currently holds numerous patents for his designs and inventions.
  
  Doucet’s work has been exhibited globally, including the London Design Museum and the Biennale International Design in Saint-Etienne. He has received numerous international awards, including a World Technology Award for Design Innovation and multiple Good Design Awards. He was also named the only ever AvantGuardian for Design by Surface Magazine. In 2017, Doucet was named the 2017 Winner of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award as Product Designer—the highest honor in his field.
  
  Doucet holds over 50 patents, and as an entrepreneur, he has created and launched a myriad of businesses aimed at making the world a better place through design, including OTHR and Airiva.

• 

  Ross Lovegrove

  Principal, Ross Lovegrove, LTD

  2024 Lifestyle Accessories Jury Member

  Born 1958, Ross Lovegrove graduated from Manchester Polytechnic with 1st Class BA Hons Industrial design in 1980 and took a Master of Design at the Royal College of Art, London in 1983. In the early 80’s worked as a designer for Frog Design in West Germany on tech projects for companies like Sony and Apple; he later moved to Paris as a consultant to Knoll International, for which he created the highly successful Alessandri Office System.
  
  Invited to join the Atelier de Nimes in 1984, alongside Jean Nouvel and Phillipe Stark, he consulted amongst others: Cacharel, Louis Vuitton, Hermes and Dupont. Returning to London in 1986 he has since worked on projects for Airbus Industries, Kartell, Ceccotti, Cappellini, Moroso, Luceplan, Driade, Peugeot, Apple, Issey Miyake, Vitra, Motorola, Biomega, LVMH, Narciso Rodriguez, Yamagiwa, Tag Heuer, Swarovski, Herman Miller, Artemide, Renault, Japan Airlines, Toyo Ito Architects, Kenzo, Valextra, GH Mumm, LG, F1, Samsung and KEF.
  
  Winner of numerous international awards his work has been extensively published and exhibited internationally including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum NY, Axis Centre Japan, Pompidou Centre, Paris and the Design Museum, London, when in 1993 he curated the first permanent Design collection. His work is held in permanent collections of various design museums around the world including the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA), the Design Museum in London, the Vitra Design Museum, in Basel, the Die Neue Sammlung, in Munich and the Centre Pompidou, in Paris.

• 

  Sahar Madanat

  Founder & Creative Director, Twelve Degrees

  2024 Lifestyle Accessories Jury Member

  Sahar Madanat is a Jordanian designer and the founder of Twelve Degrees Design. She is considered as one of the most acclaimed and awarded industrial designers in the Middle East. Having dedicated more than 20 years to the field she has been at the forefront earning recognition for her work showcased in numerous exhibitions around the world. Sahar’s curious nature has led her to approach design with a mindset focused on exploration and discovery.
  
  Her design work spans from healthcare, to wearable tech, lighting, bath and tableware as well as new concept furniture. She has worked with brands such as Nokia, OXO, Stelton and RAK ceramics. Sahar is also a design advocate at heart, she is passionate about supporting emerging talent and fostering design thinking. She actively delivers engaging talks, mentorship programs, workshops, and engages in community and governmental initiatives that leverage the transformative power of design.