Jury Alumni

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  Alex Naghavi

  Creative Director, Block

  2026 Visual Communication Jury Member

  Alex Naghavi is a Creative Director and AI-driven designer based in Los Angeles. For over 17 years, she has worked at the intersection of brand, digital product, and emerging technology—designing brands and experiences that are culturally resonant and strategically grounded.
  
  She is the former Executive Creative Director and Partner at Josephmark, a global design and venture studio where she led brand and product work for clients including Google, Spotify, Sony, Redbull, Hasbro, AMC, XPRIZE, and Twitter. During that time, she helped shape platforms such as We Are Hunted (acquired by Twitter), Clipchamp (acquired by Microsoft), and led the Myspace redesign in 2012 and the RCA Records brand refresh in 2021.
  
  Her work has been recognized by D&AD, Webby Awards, ADC Awards, SXSW, Awwwards, and Fast Company. She has served as a juror for the ADC Awards, Webby Awards, Awwwards, One Screen Film Festival, and the Leo Imagination Fund.
  
  Alongside her client and leadership work, Alex is building Seamless Studio—an AI-powered mockup platform crafted for brand designers. She is also an emerging AI filmmaker whose films have been screened internationally and awarded at Runway’s Gen:48 and the OMNI Film Festival.
  
  Alex is a first-generation Australian of Persian and Dutch heritage. Her practice is rooted in curiosity, cultural awareness, and pushing creative tools toward more expressive, human outcomes—especially as design enters a new era shaped by AI.

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  Haley Nahman

  Freelance Writer

  2020 Personal Accessory Jury Member

  Haley Nahman is a culture writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. She was most recently the Features Director at Man Repeller, a cult women's media site covering style, culture, and advice. Today she's a freelance writer interested in exploring why humans respond to the trappings of modern life the way they do. She writes a weekly newsletter called Maybe Baby.

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  Mari Nakano

  Social Designer, Systems Strategist & Educator

  2023 Design for Social Impact Jury Member

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  Cass Nakashima

  Associate, FOOD New York

  2019 Built Environment Jury Member

  Cass Nakashima is an associate at Food New York working as a Project Lead for a renovation of a 2500sf residence in Soho, new galleries for Milk Studios, renovation of Need Supply Co. flagship, residences for Kanye and Kim Kardashian West in Los Angeles and the Services Building of + POOL.

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  Youjin Nam

  Designer & Thinker, Reality Labs - Meta

  2024 A/V & Photography Equipment Jury Member, 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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  Yukiko Naoi

  Creative Director, Interwoven Design Group

  2026 Speculative Design Jury Member

  Yukiko Naoi is a creative director and industrial designer focused on human centered wearable technology, soft goods, and medical devices. As Creative Director at Interwoven Design Group, she leads projects from concept to build, designing, prototyping, and coordinating production. Selected collaborations include SharkNinja, Breg, and Areté.
  
  Yukiko led Tanaka Kapec Design Group as President, following an earlier role as Junior Partner, guiding strategy, ergonomics, usability, and end-to-end design from research through DFM for healthcare clients including Johnson & Johnson, Bausch + Lomb, AstraZeneca, and Stryker. During this tenure, she was named on over 20 patents across wearables, user interfaces, and medical devices.
  
  Beyond design, Yukiko founded REST Acupuncture in New York City after a postgraduate apprenticeship in the Integrative Therapies Program for Children with Cancer at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. She holds a MID from Pratt Institute and an MS, L.Ac. from Tri-State College of Acupuncture.

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  J. Paul Neeley

  Director, Neeley Worldwide

  2018 Service Design Jury Member

  J. Paul is Service Designer & Speculative Designer, and leads Neeley Worldwide where he helps organizations explores the social, cultural, economic, and ethical implications of emerging technologies, designing speculative futures that help engage with possibility as a way of reframing current state opportunities. Recent projects have focused on happiness, healthcare and wellbeing, sleep, self quantification, future mobility, AI, synthetic biology, closed loop fashion, homelessness prevention, and issues of complexity and computational irreducibility in design and business.
  
  J. Paul has worked professionally at Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation as Service Designer & Researcher focusing on the healthcare experience and delivery, at Teton Radiology as Service Design Manager realizing innovative medical imaging solutions, and at Unilever in Consumer & Market Insights on brand development.
  
  J. Paul is a tutor on the Service Design course at the Royal College of Art, and has guest lectured at Imperial College: Computer Science, RCA: Design Interactions, NYU: ITP, Köln International School of Design, RISD, and SVA: Design for Social Innovation. J. Paul holds an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art where he studied with Tony Dunne & Fiona Raby, and is a graduate of Northwestern University where he studied Communications Studies with a concentration in Economics.

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  Harold G. Nelson

  Visiting Scholar, University of Montana, School of Computer Science

  2015 Strategy & Research Jury Member

  Dr. Harold Nelson is a visiting scholar in the School of Computer Science at the University of Montana. He was the 2009-2010 Nierenberg Distinguished Professor of Design in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Dr. Nelson was the head of the Graduate Programs in Whole Systems Design (WSD) at Antioch University and has held teaching positions in several universities. He is a licensed architect in the State of California and worked as the assistant regional architect for the U.S. Forest Service in San Francisco, California.He is a past-president and a trustee of the International Society for Systems Science. He is the co-founding Director and President of the Advanced Design Institute and owner of Harold Nelson LLC; Organizational Design Competence. He has worked with a variety of organizations, including: non-profits and corporations, state and federal agencies, international governments and the United Nations.Dr. Nelson received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley where he designed his own graduate program in Social Systems Design. He received his Master of Architecture degree from U.C. Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Architecture from Montana State University.

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  Charlie Neshyba-Hodges

  Creative Lead, Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL)

  2024 Sustainability Jury Member

  Charlie works with the Design Studio at JPL where he has designed and manufactured installations, along with posters and artifacts, that help break down the complicated science behind a new climate change satellite called NISAR. While this helps educate and inspire the public, his work is also used to motivate and honor the engineers who work on these critical multi-year missions designed to help us better understand, and thus better protect our planet.
  
  He is the founder of the sustainable toy company called Archamelia that produces escape-room style pop-up puzzles. Made with FSC certified paper, and manufactured within a 20 mile radius of his home in Inglewood, CA, Archamelia has won numerous gold medals in industrial design competitions, merits for sustainability and social impact, and been highlighted in books for its inclusive design and featured on television for its effective STEAM engagement.
  
  At ArtCenter, he teaches an upper-term course called DesignLab2 which focuses on the environmental impact of the products we create. Using sustainable heuristics, he guides students through the deconstruction of existing products in order to evaluate their true lifecycle (from material source to disposal) all in order to pinpoint the strongest opportunities for sustainable design intervention.
  
  Prior to design, Charlie was a professional dancer. In addition to the 20 years he has spent working with Twyla Tharp, he has also collaborated with artists like Barbara Kruger, Frank Stella, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, the Sinatra Family, Maurice Sendak, Christopher Wool, Jon-Michel Othoniel, and Alejandro Inarritu.
  
  When he is not designing or dancing, he is either growing vegetables in his garden or training his frenchie, Maurice.

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  Ruki Neuhold-Ravikumar

  Acting Director, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum

  2022 Design Education Initiative Jury Member

  Ruki Neuhold-Ravikumar is the Nerman Family President-select of the Kansas City Art Institute.
  
  Originally from Chennai, India, Ruki draws from her international experiences as a designer to reimagine education and improve access to creative career pathways. Most recently, she has served as the Acting Director of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design museum. At the height of the pandemic, Ruki was the Smithsonian’s Acting Under Secretary for education, responsible for leading a Smithsonian-wide team that responded to the distance-learning needs of families that were caught in the digital divide. Ruki has also served as the Smithsonian’s Associate Provost for education and was Director of education at the Cooper Hewitt.
  
  Before joining the Smithsonian in 2017, she was the Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Central Oklahoma, where she had advanced from Professor to Director of graduate programs and Chair of the Department of Design.
  
  Ruki has served in leadership roles at all levels of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), including the AIGA Design Educators Community and local and national boards. She has been recognized by AIGA's Oklahoma Chapter with the Fellow Award in 2015 and her alma mater, Iowa State University with the Design Achievement Award in 2021.

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  Rhys Newman

  Global Head of Design & User Experience, ABB E-Mobility

  2024 Commerical & Industrial Equipment Jury Member, 2024 Robotics Jury Member

  Rhys is the Global Head of Design & User Experience at ABB E_Mobility. He previously worked as a consultant and led multi-disciplinary Design teams at Google X's Everyday Robots, Casper Sleep, NOKIA, and Lego. He co-founded his entrepreneurial venture, OMATA in 2015.
  As a Design Leader, he has a reputation for building happy and motivated studios where designers want to work, creativity is the priority, and innovation happens. He is obsessed with nurturing cultures of creativity, optimism, and the value of Design and Designing as a perspective and a practice.
  Rhys has a Master’s Degree in Product Design from the Royal College of Art in London, and a First Class Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Wales, Cardiff, UK. He has been a part-time lecturer at Art Centre, Pasadena; Goldsmiths University, London; Denmark Design School, Copenhagen; and the Royal College of Art, London. He has also served on the jury of numerous competitions, was Chair of the IDSA IDEA Awards, and has multiple patents.

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  Francois Nguyen

  Creative Director, frog

  2020 Personal Accessory Jury Captain

  François is a Creative Director at frog’s New York studio. His career began over a decade ago at Pentagram where he worked with clients such as Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Dell. He then joined ammunition where he was the lead designer for the original “Beats Studio ” headphones for Dr. Dre. Currently as one of frog’s creative leads, François is responsible for overseeing the vision of projects and managing the team. His work continually strives to be emotionally and intellectually engaging through balancing the use of materials, form, finish, poetry and metaphor.

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  Anh Nguyen

  Founder, Creative Session

  2015 Consumer Product Jury Captain

  Hoang & Anh Nguyen are the founders of Creative Session, a collaborative space for presenting trends, insights and impulsive ideas among the brothers in ways of industrial design. Industrial designers by trade but obsessed with story telling, graphics and branding.Beyond Creative Session they are leads at respectable agencies in San Francisco; Astro Studios and Matter Global. With 15 years of combined experience in consumer electronics they bring keen eye for sex appeal and functionality. They've worked on projects from small start-ups to fortune 500s.

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  Hoang Nguyen

  Founder, Creative Session

  2015 Consumer Product Jury Captain

  I believe design is an extension of our senses; things we touch, taste, hear, smell and see provokes a reaction. Design is result.