Jury Alumni

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  Raja Schaar

  Assistant Professor of Product Design, Drexel University

  2018 Consumer Product Jury Member

  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.

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  Jörg Student

  Executive Design Director, IDEO

  2018 Consumer Product Jury Member

  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.

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  David Whetstone

  Design Director, Astro Studios

  2015 Consumer Product Jury Member

  David Whetstone is an industrial designer in San Francisco, CA, but his creativity comes from the basketball courts of Northeast Ohio where he discovered athletic sneakers and self expression on the court. He remembers observing the best players and taking particular interest in how they presented themselves through clothing, posture and speech. He trained himself to observe the details, understand what people really want and why those things fit with their particularly crafted lifestyle.This ability to connect with culture has stayed with him, and he has carefully crafted his industrial design career to design products that people wear and use as expression of self. His unique position as an industrial designer with passion to create fashion relevant pieces has allowed him to work with leading lifestyle brands like Nixon, Electric Visual, Nike, Incase, and The Art of Shaving. His work has been available to buy at big department stores like Nordstrom and Barneys New York to premier boutiques like Opening Ceremony and Colette.David Whetstone is currently a Design Director at Astro Studios in San Francisco, CA.