It is with much gratitude and admiration that we celebrate the jury alumni members of the Core77 Design Awards.
Ani Liu is a designer, experimental artist and speculative technologist working at the intersection of art & science. A recent member of MIT Media Lab, she creates research-based art that explores the social, cultural & emotional implications of emerging technologies.
Ani's work has been presented at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Asian Art Museum, MIT Museum, MIT Media Lab, Wiesner Gallery, Harvard University, and media channels such as VICE, Gizmodo, TED, FOX and WIRED.
In 2014-15 she lead the research program in Sensory Mediation at the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, exploring how information visualization and augmented reality, can be harnessed to extend the human sensorium to redefine spatial experience. She taught as an Associate Instructor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she co-taught an advanced-level architectural studio called Architecture of Cultural Prosthetics: Tools for Communication and Expression in the Public Space with Krzysztof Wodiczko. She has served on numerous design panels at esteemed institutions including Dartmouth College, MIT, University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.
Ani has a B.A. from Dartmouth College, a Masters of Architecture degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a Master of Science from MIT Media Lab. She is on the committee of Art Scholars at MIT. Ani continually seeks to discover the unexpected, through playful experimentation, intuition, and speculative storytelling. Her studio is based in New York City.
Andy Logan is the Founder and Creative Director at AWOL Company, a small but mighty Southern California-based product design agency. AWOL specializes in award-winning design that challenges assumptions, grows market share, and delights users. A veteran of California’s top consultancies, Andy’s 20-year design career resume includes both BMW/Designworks and frog design, leading creative teams to tackle challenges in the Consumer, Industrial, and Medical categories.
With a strategic design philosophy, he has helped businesses as varied as HP, Nike, John Deere, Proctor & Gamble, Turtle Beach, Welch Allyn, AutoDesk, and SanDisk better connect with their customers through amazing design. Most recently, he installed a kick-ass zip line in his backyard for his three daughters.
Kasia Lys is a Lead Senior Designer in the Advanced Color and Materials studio at FCA US LLC. While Lys is responsible for overseeing the selection of exterior body paint, trim and wheel finishes for all FCA US brands, she spends the majority of her time with the Ram Truck brand. From research to material development, she oversees design and creation of all colors and materials used within the interiors of the Ram Truck model lineup. She recently completed work on the all-new Ram 1500 unveiled at the 2018 North American International Auto Show.
Lys earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in interior design with a minor in textile design from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. She enjoys a hands-on approach to design and appreciates highly crafted products and spaces.
Tom Maiorana is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design at UC Davis where he focuses on product design, design thinking, and prototyping. Tom’s research focuses on how low-resolution prototypes can help designers explore the human experience of interacting with complex systems. He is a Fellow at the John Muir Institute for the Environment where he uses design thinking methods to inform the strategy and development of the OneClimate initiative. Tom is also the founder of Red Cover Studios, which specializes in product development and innovation strategy and uses prototyping as a central practice in work ranging from interaction design to fashion to organizational change. Red Cover Studios helped to conceptualize and launch the Hive at the Claremont Colleges and Denison University’s forthcoming Design Lab. Tom regularly teaches at Stanford University’s d.school.
Tom has an MFA in Design from Stanford University and a Bachelor of the Arts from Vassar College.
Tatyana Mamut is a transformative leader, product innovator, and economic anthropologist.
She is General Manager & Director of Product at Amazon Web Services, where she is driving the development of a revolutionary new digital product. Before that, she was Vice President & Head of Product Experience for the Salesforce IoT Cloud, a big data, real-time event processing platform. She also led Salesforce’s Re-Invention of the premier CRM product, culminating in the “Lightning Experience.”
Tatyana also built and led the Organization Design Practice at global design firm IDEO. She led many high-stakes IDEO engagements including the creation of digital tools to drive citizen engagement and cultural transformation for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, development and scaling of a User-Centered Innovation Culture at Life Technologies, and the Human Centered Design (HCD) Toolkit for the Gates Foundation. She has also founded two successful consulting businesses, Emergent Thinking and CS Solutions. She has won numerous design awards for her work at IDEO and holds multiple design patents for her work at Salesforce and Amazon.
Tatyana has a PhD in economic anthropology from UC Berkeley and a BA in economics from Amherst College. She is a keynote speaker at global conferences and lectures at the Stanford D-School, focusing on technology & innovation — as well as the role of leadership & culture in creating and sustaining long-term competitive advantage in a rapidly-changing world.
Lionel is an innovation leader with a proven track record in large, complex organizations. He is passionate about galvanizing organizations around bold, customer-driven visions and empowering teams to do the best work of their lives. Currently the head of innovation at Intuit, Lionel leads a team of designers, researchers, marketers and storytellers to fuel innovation across the Small Business Group. Prior to joining Intuit in 2011, Lionel spent seven years at global innovation consultancy IDEO.
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.
Susan serves as the Head of Strategy at IDEO’s office of the CEO. In this role, she works with IDEO’s senior leadership team stewarding change and growth initiatives across the firm.
A business and organizational designer by training, she is interested in exploring how established enterprises can embrace new ways of working. Her work on the Planned Parenthood Experience won a Fast Company Innovation by Design award in 2016.
Susan started her career in the early days of Google’s European Operations in Dublin. Her service in helping to scale and grow AdWords in EMEA and beyond was recognized with a Google Luminary award. She holds a BA in German Cultural Studies and Economics from Trinity College Dublin and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Chuong Pham is the creative director and co-founder of Kaarem, a design and production studio based in Saigon and New York City. Prior to Kaarem, Chuong worked as a mechanical engineer. In 2013, he founded Kaarem with Kathy Minh Bach and launched a women’s line designed and produced entirely in their studio in Saigon. The studio focuses on blending contemporary designs with hand-crafted details.
Jennifer is a writer, educator and communications strategist. Her consulting firm, Content Matters, helps creative businesses thrive by defining their voice and learning how to communicate effectively with diverse audiences. Prior to consulting, Jennifer worked for Pentagram, Columbia CNMTL and the AIGA. She has been published in The New York Times, Core77, Against the Grain, as well as a variety of trade publications. As an educator Jennifer led Art Access II, an initiative designed to increase museum attendance among under-served communities through education and community outreach. She has taught at Parsons and FIT, and is currently on faculty in the SVA Products of Design program where she teaches design and social impact.
Ivy Ross is currently the Vice President of Design for the Hardware Product Area at Google. Previously, she was VP of Project Aura (Glass & Beyond) at Google and held executive positions ranging from head of product design and development to CMO and presidencies with several companies, including Calvin Klein, Swatch, Coach, Mattel, Art.com, Bausch & Lomb and Gap.
Ivy has been a contributing author to numerous books, including The Change Champion’s Field Guide and Best Practices in Leadership Development and Organizational Change. She has also been referenced in Ten Faces of Innovation, Rules of Thumb, and Unstuck, among other books. Ivy was the keynote speaker at the Nokia World Design Conference and Fortune Magazine’s Women Conference, and has been cited by Fast Company and Businessweek as “one of the new faces of Leadership.”
A renowned artist, her innovative metal work in jewelry is in the permanent collections of 12 international museums. A winner of the prestigious National Endowment for the Arts grant, Ivy has also received the Women in Design Award and Diamond International Award for her creative designs.
Ivy’s passion is human potential and relationships. She believes in the combination of art and science to make magic happen and bring great ideas and brands to life.
Raja Schaar, MAAE, IDSA is an Assistant Professor of Product Design at Drexel University. She is an industrial designer, museum exhibition designer, and STEAM education evangelist. She is an active museum exhibition designer working with community organizations, National Parks, and museums all over the country.
Her interdisciplinary research focuses is on methods engaging girls and underrepresented minorities in STEM/STEAM through design and technology, innovation and entrepreneurship education, healthcare wearables, and biologically inspired design. Her current research collaborations include working with departments of Dance, Education, and computing to uncover STEAM identities in African American girls through the development of performance-driven wearable technology; developing pedagogy with Drexel’s Schools of Biomedical Engineering and Entrepreneurship to examine the role of clinical immersion on product innovation; and working with the college of Nursing to develop a pre-diagnostic wearable device for preeclampsia in low-resource communities.
Before joining Drexel's Product Design faculty, Raja taught at GA Tech in both the Colleges of Design and Engineering.
In addition to her career as an industrial designer and design educator, Raja has also served as the Coordinator of School Programs at the High Museum of Art, and the Director of Programs and Operations at Museum of Design Atlanta. Raja speaks on Industrial Design, STEAM and design education at conferences and workshops all over the US.
George Sheldrake is a service and experience designer with over 15 years in the industry, working with clients in the UK, US, Europe and Australia. She has worked across the breadth of the design industry, from magazines and branding through to product and service transformation.
She believes in delivering design systems at the highest standard, from working with 90’s graphic designer Neville Brody to set up fashion magazines and culture brands, to creating the original BBC digital system GEL that is still in use today.
Her service design experience ranges from startup products like BBC Global iPlayer to an ecosystem fitness product for Nike, to transforming service approach in UK government for GDS and Ministry of Justice.
George is dedicated to creating products and services designed for the people that use them and the needs of the organizations around them. She is currently working with the HM Land Registry to support digital transformation and service change.
She is passionate about bringing together the breadth of her experience to design systems and services to help organizations change, both ‘what they do’ and ‘how they do it’.
Christopher Specce is a designer and teacher working in Providence, Rhode Island. His practice spans from commercially oriented product design to creating experimental, one a kind of objects. In addition to serving as associate professor in the Department of Furniture Design at Rhode Island School of Design, his professional experiences include projects across the furniture and consumer product industries. Prior to joining the full-time faculty at RISD, he was lead designer at the consultancy Observatory, where he contributed to projects for clients including Herman Miller and P&G.
With a belief that designed objects make an important contribution to culture, he explores the various ways that designers can embed objects with meaning. His studio practice features extensive use of digital design and fabrication tools alongside hands-on work with materials to create works that are at once mundane, delightful, modest, and forthright.
Jörg Student is an Executive Design Director based in IDEO’s Palo Alto location. He is passionate about exploring the intersection of design and engineering to elevate the human experience.
Whether designing chairs, fitness equipment, medical devices, windows, or multi-tools, Jörg believes that the best designs are developed through rapid, iterative prototyping while always empathizing with users. Since joining IDEO in 2005, Jörg has applied this approach for innovation across a diverse range of industries, including consumer products, healthcare, and technology. His work has been recognized with multiple design awards, including from Fast Company and IDSA. Jörg has also spent a year with IDEO.org, IDEO’s non-profit arm, to improve the lives of people in poor and vulnerable communities.
Outside of IDEO, Jörg enjoys experimenting with advanced origami-folding patterns and translating them into larger-scale structures and interactive, kinetic art pieces. He is the co-founder and lead artist of the art collective FoldHaus, whose sophisticated yet poetic art pieces have been shown at many festivals and museums, including Burning Man, the NY MoMA, the Exploratorium in SF, the Smithsonian in DC, The Kaneko in Omaha, and the Dubai d3 design district.
Jörg holds two Masters degrees—one in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and another in Industrial Design and Engineering from the Royal College of Art in London.
MARC THORPE DESIGN WAS FOUNDED IN 2010 BY ARCHITECT AND INDUSTRIAL DESIGNER MARC THORPE. THORPE IS KNOWN INTERNATIONALLY FOR HIS INNOVATIVE AND DYNAMIC WORK, TAKING A RIGOROUS APPROACH TO THE INTEGRATION OF ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY. THORPE AND HIS TEAM COLLABORATE WITH CLIENTS TO DEVELOP AND EXECUTE BRAND GROWTH STRATEGIES. THE STUDIO CONCEPTUALIZES DESIGN WHILE BUILDING BRANDS, AND HAS THE RESOURCES TO PRODUCE CONSISTENT COMMUNICATION PLATFORMS, INCLUDE ARCHITECTURE, INTERIOR DESIGN, DIGITAL MEDIA, GRAPHIC DESIGN, FURNITURE DESIGN, PRODUCT DESIGN, RETAIL AND EXHIBIT DESIGN.
THE STUDIO DESIGNS RELATIONSHIPS. THE FOCUS OF MARC THORPE DESIGN IS IN THE SYSTEMIC INTERSECTIONS A PROJECT PRESENTS. IN ORDER TO DISCOVER A PROJECT’S POTENTIAL, THE STUDIO WORKS CLOSELY WITH CLIENTS AND COLLABORATORS TO FOSTER NEW IDEAS, ESTABLISH COMMON VISION AND INNOVATIVE STRATEGIES OF APPROACH TO NURTURE THE DESIGN PROCESS. THE RESULTS ARE DESIGN SOLUTIONS WITH THE HIGHEST DEGREE OF PRECISION, QUALITY AND CHARACTER.
THE STUDIO OFFERS ITSELF AS AN OPEN SYSTEM OF EXCHANGE. THORPE HAS DEDICATED THE STUDIO TO THE RESEARCH, PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE AND EDUCATION OF SYSTEMS THINKING THROUGH THE DISCIPLINE OF ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN. THORPE STATES, “WE BELIEVE IN A HOLISTIC DESIGN APPROACH, WHICH ENGAGES THE SOCIAL COMPONENTS OF SPACE AND FORM.” COLLABORATIONS WITH DIGITAL ARTISTS, INTERACTIVE DESIGNERS, NEW MEDIA DESIGNERS, SOUND AND LIGHTING ENGINEERS AND SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERTS HAVE ADVANCED THE PRACTICE’S DIVERSITY AND KNOWLEDGE.