Jury Alumni

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  John Acevedo

  Principal: Design Ambassador & Creative Director: Innovation, Under Armour

  2022 Sports & Recreation Jury Member

  As Principal: Design Ambassador, John is the face and voice of design for footwear, apparel, and innovation at Under Armour (UA), focusing on recruitment, internal engagement, and cultivation of design culture. In his work, John is defining the next ten years of UA’s creative class; establishing a diverse and inclusive community that empowers individuals to reach their highest potential. As a Creative Director: Innovation, John provides strategic oversight in design, strategy, and development of footwear technologies & apparel innovation at UA with a focus on domestic manufacturing, digital experiences, automation, and wearable technology - working in categories such as running, cross-training, basketball, boxing, and space travel. John is a graduate Roger Williams University, where he received a Bachelor of Architecture.

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  Shalini Agrawal

  Associate Professor, Critical Ethnic Studies, California College of the Arts

  2022 Design Education Initiative Jury Member

  Shalini Agrawal is trained as an architect and brings over 25 years of experience in community-engaged practice. She is Founder & Principal of Public Design for Equity, a practice that re-envisions and activates new systems towards equity-driven outcomes, and Director of Pathways to Equity, a leadership experience for ethical community-engaged design. She is an award-winning educator at California College of the Arts as Associate Professor in Critical Ethnic Studies, Individualized, Interdisciplinary Design Studios and the Decolonial School. Shalini’s research and practice focuses on revealing the historical legacies of colonization in architecture and design and dismantling its lasting impacts.

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  Yuki Aihara

  Sr. Director of Advanced Concepts, Lululemon Athletica

  2022 Sports & Recreation Jury Member

  Yuki Aihara has over 20 years of innovation, performance apparel and equipment experience, delivering innovation for Formula One drivers and track & field athletes competing on the world stage to sustainable solutions for future products. He is a critical thinker and meticulous in nature, holistically viewing each solution and value proposition through the persona, user moments, design, product creation, development, manufacturing, and scalability to deliver performance benefits and new experiences. Yuki has held roles with brands such as Alpinestars, Nike, IKEA, and PVH. Currently he is the Sr. Director of Advanced Concepts at Lululemon Athletica helping to inspire and push the boundaries of performance apparel.

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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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  Dana Arnett

  CEO, VSA Partners

  2022 Visual Communication Jury Captain

  Dana is CEO of VSA Partners and a guiding force behind the firm's creation of brand programs, digital initiatives and design solutions for its diverse roster of world-class clients. His career has been steeped in design leadership, policymaking, business and brand consulting, and a long record of public service. He has been recognized internationally by multiple organizations for his contributions to design, including the Smithsonian Institute. Dana is past President of AIGA, a recipient of the AIGA Medal, an ID 40 recipient, DIFFA Unsung Hero recipient, a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale, a former board member of the Architecture & Design Society at the Art Institute of Chicago, and founding board member of Project &. In 2016, Arnett worked with the Obama Administration to brand and launch Spark, the first-ever government led global entrepreneurship initiative. In the spring of 2022, Dana and Kevin Bethune are pleased to be featured as season 11 co-hosts of the acclaimed podcast, The Design of Business, The Business of Design.

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  Lisa Babb

  Professor, School of Industrial Design, Georgia Tech University

  2022 Visual Communication Jury Member

  Lisa Babb comes from a rich history of activism and social justice through engaging citizens. She has worked in the Graphic Design field and has taught Graphic Design at the collegiate level for more than twenty years. Lisa came from Brooklyn (before it became the brand that it is now) and has lived in Atlanta for more than fifteen. She has a Master’s from Pratt Institute and a Bachelor’s from Baruch College. The same year she finished Pratt, she became a graphic design professor after September 11 changed the world for everybody.
  
  She started at a Corporate Design firm specializing in award-winning Annual reports. Some stops along the way include a commercial catalog company, a marketing group for Seagrams, two sizeable pharmaceutical advertising agencies, a commercial magazine in advertising, museums, and museums. She has designed things as small as a button, as vast as a congressional campaign, and as big as a billboard. She has also designed things as unconventional as a float for the Bud Billiken parade and as functional as a point of purchase display.
  
  Within design education specifically, she has created a Graphic Design department from the ground up. This design leader has made a point of teaching in places that encourage diversity in demographics, ideologies, and models. She started teaching Design at schools in New York City, the last one being PACE University in the Master’s program, before coming to Atlanta and teaching at SCAD and now Georgia Tech. She lives by the mantra “if you want a better world, make one” and truly believes that design and especially design education is one of the few things that can change lives. It is hard even to blink once you have graphic literacy and finally see.

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  Judith Baehner

  Founder, Het Groenlab

  2022 Built Environment Jury Member

  Judith Baehner, concept maker and plant-architect, is the founder and owner of Het Groenlab. Fascinated by nature and the relationship of humans with nature. she is a plant-guru, plant-poet, designer, and teacher. She combines her experience as a plant expert with being a stylist and editor for magazines with her passion for plants to create inspiring and inventive green experiences. Her designs, articles, books, pictures, videos, lectures, workshops, and plantings are stylish and personal. Judith wants to inspire you to love all things green as much as she does. She wants to show you how easy it is to grow plants and enjoy them. All across Europe she leads projects, talks and workshops in which you can really feel her passion and her story. Alongside the work in the ‘lab’, Het Groenlab helps individuals and companies create green living and working spaces for a happier and healthier lives. The plantings made by Het Groenlab are about cultivating personal spaces, and are planted with love and care.

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  Arundhati Bagrodia

  Service Designer, Fjord

  2022 Service Design Jury Member

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  Estelle Bailey-Babenzien

  Business Founder, Creative Director and Interior Designer, Dream Awake Studio

  2022 Furniture & Lighting Jury Member

  Estelle Bailey-Babenzien is of British and Ghanaian descent and was born and raised in the UK. She graduated from Central Saint Martins in London, with an honors degree in Fashion- communication and promotion, and moved straight to New York City. Since then, she has built her career as a creative director in the fields of music, fashion, and interior architecture and design. In 2015, she cofounded the men's/unisex clothing brand Noah with her husband, designer Brendon Babenzien. Noah has two stores in the United States, two stores in Japan, and shop-in-shops in three Dover Street Market stores globally. Simultaneously, Estelle continues to grow her design studio, Dream Awake Design, which focuses on experiential and interior design, and creative direction for commercial and residential projects and brands. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband and their six year-old daughter, Sailor.

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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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  Kevin Bethune

  Founder and Chief Creative Officer, dreams • design + life

  2022 Strategy & Research Jury Member

  Kevin Bethune is the Founder & Chief Creative Officer of dreams • design + life, a "think tank" that delivers design & innovation services using a human-centered approach. Kevin's background spans engineering, business and design in equal proportion over his 25+ year career, positioning him to help brands deliver meaningful innovations to enrich people's lives.
  
  His work represents creative problem-solving that brings multidisciplinary teams together to see the future through an open aperture, and a deep industrial design approach to inform and influence desirable, feasible and business-viable design outcomes.
  
  Kevin began his career as a mechanical engineer in the nuclear power industry. This chapter gave him deep product experience working with high performing teams across 14 nuclear reactor upgrade campaigns. After his MBA, Kevin joined Nike, Inc. in a business capacity, but quickly navigated to the Global Footwear product engine to drive advanced digital product creation capabilities, discovering the world of design in the process. After solidifying his creative foundation through further studies at ArtCenter College of Design, Kevin co-founded distinct design & innovation capabilities at two Tier 1 management consulting firms in Booz & Co. and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). As Vice President of Strategic Design at BCG Digital Ventures, he led a large cohort of designers that would influence and shape every corporate venture spun out from the incubator. Kevin left BCG Digital Ventures to carve his own path under the banner of dreams • design + life, focusing on unlocking human potential through strategic design, industrial design and the building of new ecologies.
  
  Kevin also serves as a Board Trustee for ArtCenter College of Design and a Board Director for the Design Management Institute (DMI).

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  Nadia Beyzaei

  Sessional Faculty & Health Design Lab Staff, Emily Carr University of Art + Design

  2022 Health & Wellness Jury Member

  Nadia Beyzaei (MRes, BSc) is a designer and researcher working in the spaces of health and community engagement. Nadia is the Coordinator of the Health Design Lab at Emily Carr University and an instructor in the Faculty of Design + Dynamic Media. Through her role at the Health Design Lab, Nadia has been a communication designer and design researcher on Indigenous health, aging, and complex care projects, while supporting the dissemination of research both locally and internationally.
  
  Nadia holds a Master of Research in Healthcare + Design degree from the Royal College of Art, with her thesis work focusing on how design can enhance engagement in evidence-based medicine.
  
  Through her 7 years at BC Children's Hospital Research Institute, Nadia has worked on a range of behavioural health research projects, including UX/UI projects which aim to improve access to care, and service design projects across clinics at BC Children's Hospital. Her practice focuses on making complex topics accessible and approachable through visual and strategic design.

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  Alisha Bhagat

  Futures Lead, Forum for the Future

  2022 Speculative Design Jury Captain

  Alisha Bhagat is a futurist and strategist whose work focuses on the creative use of futures tools such as strategic foresight and scenarios planning to impact long term positive change, particularly around social justice. She is based at Forum for the Future, a non-profit, and is a part-time faculty member at Parsons School of Design. Alisha is passionate about changing the narrative around who the future is for - and convenes the Diaspora Futures Collective, a group of POC working on decolonizing, reframing, and taking action for the future. When she isn't thinking about the future, Alisha is an avid gamer and science fiction nerd. She holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University.

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  Niti Bhan

  Designer, Emerging Futures Lab (consulting) and Ymmärrys ry (non-profit)

  2022 Consumer Technology Jury Member

  After 30 odd years in the global design industry opening doors to new markets through exploratory user research, concept design, and innovation strategies, Niti is pursuing a part time PhD in Product Development at Aalto University, Finland. Her research explores the contribution of collaborative design practices to foster agency and capacity for innovation as a resilience strategy to shocks for micro-enterprises. Her design approach is a transdisciplinary one where participants generate the actionable knowledge for designing their own innovation and transformation roadmaps

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  David Block

  Principal, Studio Redeye

  2022 Personal Accessory Jury Member

  After receiving his MID from Pratt Institute in 2005, David Block spent his early career at the well-known branding firm Desgrippes Gobe—now Brand Image—and other elite studios/brands. He founded Studio Redeye in 2013, with a focus on products in the juvenile, kitchen, and sports equipment categories. David specializes in designing products with and for innovative startups with whom he forms long-lasting relationships, helping these companies grow into leaders in their category.
  And now, you can understand Dave’s unique aesthetic. A rare mix of high-end craft with grounded sensibilities. He excels at making products that fit into your life, that you can connect with emotionally. His is a proven track record of award winning and exceptional design.

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  Hanna Bossmark

  Senior Industrial Designer, Independent

  2022 Commercial Equipment Jury Member

  Hanna Bossmark is an independent designer based in San Francisco with focus on making products and experiences that connect purpose, culture, beauty and commercial viability. Previously, Hanna led industrial design efforts at Branch Creative, and also worked for IDEO, Ammunition and Zound, turning ideas to reality for companies such as Hims, Equal Parts, Lyft and Urbanears.
  
  
  Outside of design work, Hanna is a certified yoga teacher and founder of Space For Stillness, creating tools to encourage meditation practices in promotion for a healthy lifestyle.